conqueror tribes. No visitor could fail to be impressed with the grandeur and solidity of the structure which, for nigh ten centuries, has re-echoed with the voice of Christian worship. To the kindly vicar who with pardonable pride exhibited his charge I expressed my admiration of the architectural beauty of proportion, the tough, thick, sloping walls, the deep, graceful windows and porches, the beams of massive oak. I even went so far as to venture that the presence of 'dry-rot' in floor and pew was a novelty to me. 'You may get more of it from the pulpit,' was his humorous reply.

The historical associations connected with the edifice could not fail to suggest a theme, and I take the opportunity of changing places with the vicar and of unburdening my soul of a few reflections, which, if they simply provoke discussion, will satisfy my ambition and gratify my vanity. Here, close at hand, in a niche in the south nave, prone upon a plain stone tomb, reposes. the wooden effigy of a man who, could he have been brought to life, would have given a clue to the mystery I desired to solve.

A splendid specimen of a splendid man of six feet in height, the effigy in wood of the son of the founder of the church in which he lies, bears witness to the reverence in which he must have been held and what a master of his craft must have been the artist. Not a chip is there in gallant John de Port. He lies in his mail hawberk, with two cushions under his head, surcoat reaching below his knees, girdle, crosshilt sword, hands closed in prayer, spurs complete, and a lion at his feet, the emblem of knighthood. The crafty woodman artist has defied the ravages of heat and wet and cold by hollowing out the figure at the back and filling the cavity with charcoal. Posterity is grateful to him for his forethought.

Let us hear what John could tell us of his days, for those were stirring times.

He comes from the Norman stock who, with horsemen and archers, bore down the footmen and axemen of brave Harold on the field of Hastings. From that day onwards, for nigh on five centuries, horse and bow were England's mainstay, and our Norman rulers were careful to see that every man in the Kingdom knew the value of one or the other. If Sir John could accompany us to the churchyard he would point with pride to the strong yews that still fringe the enclosure and which in old days provided the material for his bowmen. For the law imposed this duty upon the clergy of planting yews, and more than this. On Sundays and holidays the rural pastimes had to give place to the practice of archery. The price of the bow was regulated by Government, so as to put the possession of the weapon within the means of all. Later on, as the home

grown yews, a tree of slow growth, gave out in strength and length which the gradual perfection of the art of shooting demanded, the importation of bowstaves became a necessity. Wine merchants who catered for the thirsty spirits of the age were penalised with ten good staves for every butt they imported; other merchants were bound under similar dues. Penalties were exacted for inferior workmanship in bow or arrow, and every goose had to subscribe his quota of six good feathers for the arrows. No neglected study was this of the personal arms. In later years the height of a man regulated the length of his bow, and, as handicraft in metal developed, steel tips on the arrows became general. Who knows but that this step in advance did not suggest to the Great Frederick the idea of substituting iron for wood in the ramrods of the muskets which secured for him his kingdom?

When monarchs rule and give their minds to the study and perfection of weapons, a nation in arms is well assured against offence, and when they lead in battle they take good care that both men and material behind them are of the best. With laws that bound each able-bodied man not only to possess a bow but to perfect himself in its use, no wonder our kings could lead to victory even with odds against them, for do not Crécy, Poictiers, and the crowning triumph of Agincourt testify to the mutual confidence between leader and led?

Nor was the value of sea power neglected by our Norman forbears. Coming from oversea themselves they speedily transformed the national capacity for sea war into an organised system, and set to work to create a navy as the first safeguard of the land.

As long as science in the manufacture of arms did not march beyond a weapon of simple construction and facile manipulation it was an easy matter for a simple-minded manhood to master the art of arms, especially when the training was enforced in early youth.

The bow for centuries remained the personal weapon of the mass of the soldiery. The musters in 1574-75 account for 1,172,674 able men for service, each trained to use his weapon. People who dream that the Spaniards of the Armada would have fared better on land than on sea are grievously out of their reckoning. Not in all our history can we find a period when we have more reason to be proud of the exhibition of the real soul of the nation. Never has the roll of adventurers by sea and land been so great or so famous as at this period, when the security of the homeland allowed of full licence to the spirit of the age. The pages of Hakluyt are replete with the records of the daring and enduring men of these days.

The fruits of the exploits of these gallants laid once and for ali time, we must hope, the foundation of the wealth and worth

which we as Britons now enjoy. A race of men sprang up to whom adventure was as the very breath of life, to whom danger was a positive delight, who carried terror into the most distant seas, who courted no allies, and who stamped for ever on the character of the nation a spirit of ambition, self-reliance and selfdependence. Starting first as adventurers who put money into the business of war, they gradually developed into chartered companies, carrying out their ventures under cover of the State, but owing no allegiance to any political party they worked for themselves, and for that reason for the English nation. Call these leaders filibusters if you will, or pirates, in plain modern English, yet they were distinctly men, and men who knew how to exact obedience from followers who speedily learnt the value of discipline. Is it not that mutual feeling of confidence between leaders and led that forges the armour of a nation? For a full century later did this virile spirit permeate the character of the people, reaching, perhaps, its zenith under the rule and guiding hand of Cromwell. Never did our nation stand more powerful in the Councils of Europe than it did behind the targeteers, the horsemen, the musketeers and the pikemen of the Great Protector. The blend of the national spirit and character formed a concrete foundation, upon which it was safe to build up an empire. Would that the inheritors of this empire could remember that a State can only be maintained by the same forces which have created it! Then came a change which revolutionised both character and spirit.

The employment of gunpowder, previously confined to cannon service, came into general use with the personal weapon. Undoubtedly the invention of gunpowder, though a warlike contrivance, has been of extreme service to the interests of peace.

The musket, a new weapon of offence, involving costly equipment, the manufacture of an explosive, prolonged training to acquire the art of handling it, discipline and practice under expert leaders, debarred the majority of men from the possibility of procuring arms.

To suit the altered circumstances a new system was organised. Bodies of men were trained for the sole purpose of war, and these bodies were separated from the men in other employments in which formerly all soldiers were engaged. Thus arose standing armies. In this way immense numbers of men-far the greater bulk of the nation-were gradually weaned from their old warlike habits, and being forced into purely civil life, their energies developed peaceful pursuits which hitherto had been neglected. The unsuspected decay in the national capacity for arms set in. The growth of the progress was slow, but imperceptibly the fibre of the manhood took in the germs of dry-rot when the healthy exercise of arms was no longer demanded as a duty. Fortunately

the passion for pastimes has insensibly arrested the full force of the disease for undoubtedly they foster ambition, demand selfdiscipline, develop personal courage, and influence the spirit of the individual.

With the free exercise of the cultivation of the arts of peace, the intellect developed, and as its activity increased, the lust of war gradually succumbed to the general pursuit of knowledge. If knowledge be power when in the hands of intellect, it very soon proved itself the master of the war spirit of the nation, for exercise of the mind was certainly not demanded from either leaders or led in the standing army. No calling in life can earn the dignity of being called an art or a science when brain work is not put into it, and as none was exacted from the military profession in which both officers and men spent the best part of their lives, the 'Art of War' made little progress as a study.

With the growth of wealth and with the fear that an increase in the number of men trained to arms might result in those arms being a trouble to themselves in peace, our rulers encouraged the system of hiring foreign soldiers to enable the country to play a part in Continental warfare. The opportunity of gaining war experience was thereby denied to our leaders in the profession of arms, and the intellect of a profession already dulled by inaction and lack of encouragement became stagnant. Every important addition made to knowledge increases the authority of the intellectual classes, and as the intellect acquisitions of a people increase, they lose sight of the fact that readiness for war is still a factor for peace. Their studies become organised into separate classes, such as trade, commerce, manufacture, law, diplomacy, literature, science, art, philosophy, &c., and each class insists upon the supreme importance of its own pursuit. With a class whose intellect is not cultivated and whose thoughts are centred on the chances of personal distinction in war, a long peace must beget stagnation; it drops behind in the race for improvement, and the military service necessarily declines not only in reputation, but in ability. Small wonder, then, that parents whose offspring showed promise of genius took care to bring them up to one of the lay professions, where intellect and industry promised reward. The fool of the family could always fall back upon the Army or the Church. As soon as eminent men grow unwilling to enter a profession, the lustre of that profession will be tarnished.

A more convincing proof of the absolute apathy which prevailed in the minds of the nation in regard to military matters lies in the almost total absence of any literary work bearing upon the lessons to be learnt from the many wars of the eighteenth century, and also those of the greatest soldier of all ages, until the middle of the nineteenth century, when historians. and students began to realise that there was science in warfare,

that there were principles on which the great actors in the drama of war both by sea and land have based their actions, and postulates on which to found maxims. Nor with the march of science in other branches of industry and manufacture did any mind turn to the improvement of weapons of war by either sea or land. The old Victory at Portsmouth is a monument of the truth of this contention. She was a worn-out old craft forty years old when she went into battle at Trafalgar, and was then rated the fastest of battleships. Surely some mind could in forty years have devised improvement; and again, although for one thousand years we have led the world on sea, it was not until the advent of steam that men woke up to the fact that a change of rig and hull could make a ship sail close to the wind and double her speed.

A similar stagnation of intellect existed in the land forces. For nearly two centuries the flint-lock musket, with slight alterations, remained the ideal weapon for the soldier. Even with the experience gained under our Iron Duke, we failed to shake off antiquated military methods and customs. For half a century after Waterloo our Army was burdened with officers whose hope of promotion was governed more by the depth of their purses than by the breadth of their brain; whose thirst for knowledge was positively discouraged by their superiors; and whose men followed suit in indolent habits in addition to being totally illiterate. Two Continental wars woke us up to some shortcomings in our system. Mr. Cardwell handled the matter in the bold spirit required, and in direct opposition to Parliament proceeded to take the Army out of pawn, and, ably seconded by Wolseley, introduced a young and fresh element into the ranks. Although our Army remained, and still remains, a standing Army in the old sense, yet from this date it began to turn the corner and began to think. A few deep students of war committed their thoughts and conclusions to print as a groundwork for others in pursuit of the military branch of knowledge. Hamley in our own tongue, Clausewitz and Jomini in foreign tongues, stand out prominently as the earlier exponents of classics on operations in war, but not until the American Mahan opened the eyes of our nation and its seamen to the lessons to be learnt from the brilliant deeds of our Navy did the country realise the potency of sea power and its influence on strategy by making use of the combined action of its sea and land forces. It is this combination which, if thoroughly

1 As an illustration of the indifference to military questions affecting our world position which exists in our politicians and educational leaders, I once asked the late Sir F. Powell, M.P., the well-known authority on school matters, whether he had read Mahan's Influence of Sea Power upon History. He replied, "He had never heard of it or of Mahan."

VOL. LXXII-No. 426