e because we had not thought to take glycerine. The perpetual novelty
of modern conditions demands an imaginative alertness we eliminate. I do
not believe that the Army Council or anyone in authority has worked out
a tithe of the essential problems of contemporary war. If they have,
then it does not show. Our military imagination is half-way back to bows
and arrows. The other day I saw a detachment of the Legion of
Frontiersmen disporting itself at Totteridge. I presume these young
heroes consider they are preparing for a possible conflict in England or
Western Europe, and I presume the authorities are satisfied with them.
It is at any rate the only serious war of which there is any manifest
probability. Western Europe is now a network of railways, tramways, high
roads, wires of all sorts; its chief beasts of burthen are the railway
train and the motor car and the bicycle; towns and hypertrophied
villages are often practically continuous over large areas; there is
abundant water and food, and the commonest form of cover is the house.
But the Legion of Frontiersmen is equipped for war, oh!--in Arizona in
1890, and so far as I am able to judge the most modern sections of the
army extant are organised for a colonial war in (say) 1899 or 1900.
There is, of course, a considerable amount of vague energy demanding
conscription and urging our youth towards a familiarity with arms and
the backwoodsman's life, but of any thought-out purpose in our arming
widely understood, of any realisation of what would have to be done and
where it would have to be done, and of any attempts to create an
instrument for that novel unprecedented undertaking, I discover no
trace.

In my capacity of devil's advocate pleading against national
over-confidence, I might go on to the quality of our social and
political movements. One hears nowadays a vast amount of chatter about
efficiency--that magic word--and social organisation, and there is no
doubt a huge expenditure of energy upon these things and a widespread
desire to rush about and make showy and startling changes. But it does
not follow that this involves progress if the enterprise itself is dully
conceived and most of it does seem to me to be dully conceived. In the
absence of penetrating criticism, any impudent industrious person may
set up as an "expert," organise and direct the confused good intentions
at large, and muddle disastrously with the problem in hand. The "expert"
quack and the bu