1808. CHAP. always felt as an enjoyment by civilians. The evil of the III. ballot for the regular militia was in practice very little felt in the country, as the men were drawn for service during the war, which gave them a lasting occupation; and so large a portion of them was composed of substitutes, who entered the militia for a bounty, and as a step to the line, in which they ultimately landed, that it in effect was little more than a disguised mode of carrying out the voluntary system. For this very reason, however, a regular militia, if raised, as it has always been since the peace, by voluntary enlistment, should always be on condition of the men being embodied for a considerable time, as five or seven years certain. The ballot is excellent for drawing forth the real strength of the country, and is never felt as a burden when it is for a month or six weeks' service in the year only; but if the men enlist of their own accord, it is necessary to give them the certainty of employment for a considerable time. To dismiss them after six or nine months' embodiment only, is to make them lose one employment without gaining another, and render unpopular the whole service in which such a risk is undergone. It is to this cause that the awful deficiency in the numbers raised for the regular militia, which in 1859 amounted to 60,000 men, according to the statement of General Peel, the War Minister, is to be ascribed. 24. ciples on Britain. This matter has now, in consequence of the endangered True prin- position of the country since the restoration of the Napothe subject leonic dynasty in France, become one of the very highest for Great importance, and the principles by which it should be regulated are simple, and when once stated must command general assent. The fundamental principle is, that all classes should be called on to contribute to the public defence, and that in the way least burdensome and most equitable for each. With this view it is indispensable to divide the armed force into three classes, gradually ascending from the very lowest to the highest grades of society. 1. The local militia, to be raised by ballot in III. 1808. the several counties, clothed and paid by Government, and CHAP. governed by officers of its appointment. 2. Volunteers who pay for their own accoutrements, and serve without pay, and in return have the privilege of electing their own officers up to, but not above, the rank of major. 3. The regular militia and army, which are to be kept permanently embodied, and differing only in the former being not bound to leave the British Islands except by their own consent. The regular army to be raised by volunteers, either direct, or from the regular or local militia, for which they would both serve as a nursery. Perhaps the more advisable course would be to have second battalions of regular regiments instead of regular militia, not bound to serve out of the country, from which the first battalions might be formed by voluntary enrolment. In that way you would get a superior class of officers. By some such system as this the safety of the country may be absolutely secured, as long as the courage and public spirit of all classes continue. Without it the nation will at all times be exposed on the first breaking out of a war to serious reverses, which, if assailed by a powerful and ambitious foreign enemy, may lead to its entire subjugation.* * The regular army should be kept up by recruits having "the option of entering for general service, either limited or unlimited in point of time. The former would be thrown principally into the second, the latter into the first battalions. The embarrassment and endless complexity of performing colonial and distant services by troops serving on short and determinable engagements would thus be in a great degree avoided, while the army would at the same time have the benefit of inviting into its ranks those who may be averse to enlist into it without some limitation of time. The second battalions, though chiefly composed of men whose service was limited in point of time, would nevertheless be liable to be employed in any part of the world should occasion require it; and should it be found at any time necessary, during war, to levy suddenly by ballot a large body of men for the regular army, it would not be difficult at the moment to appropriate either garrison or a limited selection of second battalions to receive them, from whence, though originally entering only for home service, they would gradually engage for a more extended description of service. "The regular militia, liable to service out of their counties, would be constituted and raised precisely as at present, with only the additional facility of procuring men by enlistment from the sedentary militia. A corps of this description seems an indispensable ingredient in the army of a State which must reduce its military force suddenly in time of peace, and call it forth as VOL. I. Q CHAP. III. 1808. 25. cess of Lord Castlereagh's measures ing the army. The military measures of Lord Castlereagh were adopted by the Cabinet, and proved eminently successful. One half of the militia establishment were allowed to Great suc- volunteer into the line, which produced at once 33,000 good soldiers, who were speedily replaced by the ballot in the regular militia. The result was an increase of 23,000 for recruit- effective men to the army after supplying the usual casualties; and, including artillery, the regulars and regular militia were raised on 1st February 1808 to 310,000 men, of whom 93,000 were on foreign, and 217,000 on home service. This, the Duke of York justly remarked, York's Me- was a much larger force than "the country at any former period possessed; and the composition of the regular Castlereagh army, particularly of the infantry, has been so much imviii. 162. proved by the late drafts from the militia, that the respective battalions average about 700 rank and file 1 Duke of moraudum, Feb. 1, 1808; Corresp. suddenly upon the recurrence of war. Without such a force, capable of being rapidly disembodied and reassembled, we should be either too strong an army in peace or too weak in war. To compose the entire army on constant pay of regular troops would be to subject the country to an enormous half-pay list; and to leave such a chasm in our military force to be filled up on the breaking out of a war, before we could arrive at our standard strength, as to doom the country for the three or four first campaigns either to weakness at home or inactivity abroad.” The volunteers should be very much reduced in number when the local militia is called out; but they may always be kept up at 100,000 at very trifling expense. The local militia should not be of "less than 200,000 for England, with a corresponding proportion for Scotland. It is perhaps too hazardous either to train or to arm the people of Ireland indiscriminately, where the men so brought together are not permanently subjected to the constraint of military discipline. Perhaps an extension and regenerating of the volunteer corps, under an obligation to pass a certain number of days in each year on permament duty, might for the present be more applicable to the situation of the country. . . The sedentary militia in Great Britain to be chosen by ballot for a service of three years, out of the trained men; to be regimented and officered as the militia now is; to be trained in war as the regular militia now is in time of peace; and to be liable to service out of their counties only in case of invasion or rebellion.”—LORD Castlereagh's Memorandum to the Cabinet, December 1807; Castlereagh Correspondence, viii. 122-124. Such were Lord Castlereagh's principles on this all-important subject, and they were in themselves so reasonable and suitable to the circumstances of the country, that they are very nearly the same as those now (1860) in operation. The country has never since been endangered but by their abandonment during the periods of mental hallucination which never fail to seize upon its inhabitants after any considerable period of unbroken peace. III. each. The force at home, including the new militia CHAP. levies, will exceed by nearly 25,000 men the greatest amount of force which has hitherto been stationed in Great Britain and Ireland for its home defence." 1808. 26. out of the It was fortunate for Great Britain, and for the cause of European freedom, that Lord Castlereagh Breaking had at this juncture taken these decisive measures Spanish to augment the strength of the regular army; for the war. period was approaching when it was to be tried to the uttermost, and when the cause of general independence was to rest on its sabres and bayonets. So far from being deterred by the bad success of his attempt to gain possession of the Portuguese fleet from pursuing further his ambitious designs on the Peninsula, Napoleon was only stimulated thereby to urge them on with greater activity, and thus secure himself from being anticipated, as he had been at Copenhagen and Lisbon, in his designs against the Spanish monarchy. Troops were marched through Germany and France with the utmost expedition towards the Pyrenees; the advanced corps at Bayonne were pushed forward without a moment's delay towards Madrid; and the imperious demand for the delivery of the Prince of Asturias was followed by the insurrection in the Spanish capital of May 2, which was May 2. soon extinguished in blood, and roused the whole nation by a unanimous and instinctive impulse to arms. Deprived of their regular army by the treacherous forethought of the French Emperor, who had stationed it in Jutland intending to make it instrumental in seizing the Danish fleet-without a government, and with their chief fortresses in the hands of the enemy-the Spanish people unanimously rose against their oppressors, elected juntas in the different provinces, and separately began a mortal war with the invaders. Success, as might have been expected under such circumstances, was various, and victory was often largely intermingled with disaster; but upon the whole the insurgents maintained their ground; and at III. CHAP. length the defeat and surrender of Dupont with 20,000 men, in the defiles of the Sierra Morena, acted as a thunderbolt which first broke the spell which had hitherto bound the world, and speedily sent the French armies in disgrace behind the Ebro. 1808. 27. reagh's disposition of the land force and of Great active ope rations. Foreseeing the approach of a crisis of this description, Lord Castle-Lord Castlereagh had so disposed the military force of Great Britain, with the transports necessary for their conveyance, as to be able to take immediate advantage of transports it. The system adopted by his predecessors of breaking Britain for up the whole transport service in order to save £4000 amonth, and thereby chaining the British forces, at the most critical time, when they might have decided the contest, to their own shores, was given up and succeeded by one which rendered them instantly available. Not only had he the whole forces of Great Britain and Ireland deemed disposable quartered in the southern counties of the two islands, within a short distance of the ports of embarkation, but a fleet of transports was there collected, available at a moment's notice, capable of conveying them at once to whatever point might be selected for attack. Add to this that a fleet of transports was lying at Gottenburg capable of bringing away the British troops under General Moore, left at Gottenburg, and which was afterwards of essential service in transporting the Spanish corps under the Marquis de Romana, from their place of exile in Jutland, to the theatre of more honourable warfare in the north of Spain. Thus, at length, the British forces, brought up to an unprecedented state of strength and efficiency, were disposed in the situation which Lord Castlereagh had so long desired, and which more than tripled their real strength, for they were capable of being suddenly transported to an unforeseen reagh Cor- point of attack, and inspiring widespread dread in the enemy by the uncertainty where the blow was likely to fall.1 1 Castle resp. viii. 174-177. The knowledge of Napoleon's intention to unite the |