r true place in the
State. Their duties require for their proper performance the best heads
as well as the best-schooled wills that can be found, and impose upon
them a laborious life. There can be no good teacher who is not also a
student, and a national army requires from its officers a high standard
not only of character, but of intelligence and knowledge. It should
offer a career to the best talent. A national army must therefore
attract the picked men of the universities to become officers. The
attraction, to such men consists, chiefly, in their faith in the value
of the work to be done, and, to a less degree, in the prospect of an
assured living. Adequate, though not necessarily high, pay must be
given, and there must be a probability of advancement in the career
proportionate to the devotion and talents given to the work. But their
work must be relied upon by the nation, otherwise they cannot throw
their energies into it with full conviction.

This is the reason why, if there is to be a national army, it must be
the only regular army and the nation must rely upon nothing else. To
keep a voluntary paid standing army side by side with a national army
raised upon the principle of universal duty is neither morally nor
economically sound. Either the nation will rely upon its school or it
will not. If the school is good enough to serve the nation's turn, a
second school on a different basis is needless; if a second school were
required, that would mean that the first could not be trusted.

There can be no doubt that in a national school of war the professional
officers must be the instructors, otherwise the nation will not rely
upon the young men trained. The 200,000 passed through the school every
year will be the nation's best. Therefore, so soon as the system has
been at work long enough to produce a force as large as the present
total, that is, after the third year, there will be no need to keep up
the establishment of 138,000 paid privates, the special reserve, or the
now existing territorial force. There will be one homogeneous army, of
which a small annual contingent will, after each year's training, be
enlisted for paid service in India, Egypt, and the oversea stations, and
a second small contingent, with extra training, will pass into the paid
reserve for service in small oversea expeditions.

The professional officers and sergeants will, of course, be
interchangeable between the national army at home and it