consideration what would be the best line of conduct for this country to adopt, in order to secure these valuable appendages, whereby we are enabled to draw wealth and sustenance from many nations and climates, and to diffuse our manufactures even to the ends of the earth.

Seeing that any future war must be attended with far greater expense than any former one, I would propose enfilading all practical landing places by the floating redoubts before-mentioned, and establishing a colonial steam flotilla, the expenses of which I conceive ought to be borne by the inhabitants of those colonies who enjoy the benefit of the protection and trade of this country, and which, together with the assistance of the garrisons of the island and the fleet upon the station, would render the capture of our colonies as difficult as ever.

I have thus endeavoured to point out some of the advantages which an enemy would derive from the use of steam navigation, and have suggested such means to counteract them as appear to me calculated to do so.

I do not mean to say, that the projects here proposed are the best that could be devised for these purposes, my object principally is to direct attention to the subject, as one which must ultimately exercise a powerful influence upon the destinies of the British empire.

R. W.

CONSIDERATIONS ON GRATUITOUS MILITARY EDUCATION, AND ITS EFFECT ON THE ROYAL REGIMENT OF ARTILLERY.

BY A FIELD OFFICER.

(A DIALOGUE between the Prussian General Gneisenau and a British Officer.) English Officer.-THAT handsome and extended pile of buildings you mention to have observed near Sandhurst is the Military College of England. It was founded during the great struggle with republican France, and is capable of lodging a body of students sufficiently numerous to supply the demands of the largest army the country is ever likely to possess.

Parliament granted the money expended in its erection; and during the war annually voted large sums for the pay of officers to maintain the discipline, and for the salaries of professors and masters in every branch of mili tary study, to advance the instruction of the cadets, who were excited to emulation and good conduct by the personal attention and encouragement of the most distinguished officers in the army.

Gen. G.-But during peace does Parliament continue to vote the large sums necessary for the maintenance of this splendid national military seminary?

English Officer.-No: every year, since the termination of hostilities, the independent members of Parliament have objected to the grant for this military establishment; and the government, apprehensive that the benefits of the institution might be altogether lost to the army, have reduced the number of students from 400 to 200, and have formed an arrangement by which the sons of general and flag officers being made to pay the full cost, and the sons of civilians far more than the actual cost of their education, the surplus enables the college to maintain and educate the sons of regimental and naval officers under those ranks, and orphans in pecuniary distress, on a graduated descending scale of charge, of very moderate amount to the latter, and that with little aid from the public purse.

Gen. G.-This college is another proof of the liberal views and sound discretion of your statesmen. It must have rendered knowledge general throughout your army, and have produced many officers of superior science, who, by the application of their talents and attainments to professional objects, will have repaid tenfold the expenditure on the institution.

English Officer.-Sandhurst College has assuredly been of much service to the army, as during a period when military education was utterly neglected, it served to supply the regiments with numerous youths well instructed in all the elementary details of their profession. But from some defect in the course of studies (never satisfactorily explained), it is not deemed capable of imparting much scientific or mathematical knowledge to the students! Gen. G.-On what grounds do you hazard this reproach?

English Officer.-On the assertions of the members of the Government, repeated in every session of Parliament, and never opposed by any onethat, in order to have the means of imparting mathematical instruction to the few students required to fill the casualties which occur in the ordnance corps, they find it absolutely necessary that the public should maintain a second military college at a greater cost even than that of the principal military college.

Gen. G.-Ordnance corps !-pray explain that term.

English Officer.-It means the regiment of artillery and corps of engineers. Ours is a mixed government, or rather a government of departments, from which some good and much needless expense ensues. By this peculiarity in our military constitution, the artillery and engineers form a distinct branch of the military service, under the independent command and control of the Master General of the Ordnance, and have institutions and establishments exclusively their own; so much so as to form, during war, an imperium in imperiô, and cause the country to defray the cost of duplicate establishments of every nature.

Gen. G.-An education for these distinguished corps, under such fostering care, must be an object of general solicitude, and is, of course, very highly paid for by the favoured individuals?

English Officer.-On the contrary, the students are lodged, fed, clothed, and instructed at the public expense throughout the whole course of their education.

Gen. G.-Then the students pay much higher for their commissions than the rest of the army?

English Officer.-Again wrong: their first commission is given to them, as is every succeeding commission; indeed gratuitous promotion is assured to them, by regular succession, from the rank of second lieutenant to the highest rank in the military profession, merely provided they commit no breach of the Articles-of-War to subject themselves to dismissal.

Gen. G.-Impossible that the public should be obliged to clothe, lodge, feed, and instruct from boyhood, those to whom they give commissions, and assure unconditionally, gratuitous promotion to the highest rank in the army, in a country where military employment is so highly prized, that parents and guardians, after expending large sums in educating youths at expensive classical schools, may be found daily craving with earnestness the favour of being allowed to pay from five to seven hundred pounds for an ensigncy or second lieutenancy; and in a country where it is notorious the same youths will subsequently expend from five to nine thousand pounds to raise themselves to the rank of a lieutenant-colonel-all of which is lost to their families, should they have the honour to fall in their country's battles, or sink under disease in her pestilential colonies.

I cannot understand this; it is contrary to every principle that actuates rational creatures. You must demand particular qualities of mind and body, or a rare degree of talent, in the youths selected to be thus educated and provided for by the public?

English Officer.-Again wrong: the height of four feet eight inches in a boy of fourteen years' old, and certain acquirements usually attained by lads of ordinary capacities at twelve or thirteen years of age, is every thing demanded.

Gen G.-Now I divine the mystery. These favoured youths are all the orphans of officers who have fallen in battle, or by the effect of climate;

or the sons of officers and other public functionaries of undisputed merits and services, or who have undeniable claims on the Government; so that the state saves in malt what it pays in meal?

English Officer.-Again wrong: by a return made last sessions to an order of the House of Commons, it appeared that of 130 youths receiving gratuitous education at Woolwich only twenty were the sons of officers; and that the majority of those twenty had parents capable of paying for their education, and had obtained admittance into the Ordnance Academy merely through personal or private interest, of various natures, with the MasterGeneral.

Gen. G.-Do relieve me from this puzzle. Your course of education must include something of extremely difficult attainment, or be enforced with a strictness and rigour that disqualifies boys of ordinary capacities from entering the academy?

English Officer.-Again wrong: the course of studies is far less perfect, and less extensive, than that of the Ecole Polytechnique at Paris, and of other continental military colleges; and further, the ordnance academy at Woolwich, being generally regarded in the light of a charitable institution, and as a certain and assured provision for a youth who has friends to get his name inserted on the list of candidates, the interest of the parent is always opposed to and usually prevails over that of the public.

When a boy is examined for admission into the academy, the inquiry is not, does he possess superior abilities or attainments? but, is he able to answer in such a manner as to admit of his being conscientiously reported qualified according to the printed regulations?

On his probationary examination the same feeling predominates. The board of officers, mostly parents, and having, or hoping to have, sons and nephews cadets, merely ask themselves if they can reconcile it to their consciences to report that the student has sufficient talent to be recommended to remain at the academy. Again, on his final examination, the inquiry is limited to ascertaining that he can answer sufficiently well to admit of his being reported fit for a commission. In fact, throughout the whole course of studies, the object of parent, teacher, and cadet, is attained, if the latter imbibes such a degree of information as shall prevent his being discharged from the institution.

Gen. G.-Do you mean that the public bear the expense of the education of youth merely to ensure their attaining the minimum of acquirement necessary for the engineer and artillery service?

English Officer.-Such undoubtedly is the general effect of gratuitous education. Happily, however, in the Ordnance Academy it has always been tempered by the zeal of the professors and masters, and a spirit of emulation and ambition which they have been able to excite and maintain amongst the clever lads who are accidentally admitted as cadets. These clever lads, who generally become well versed in the mathematical sciences, have fed the artillery and engineers with a succession of valuable officers, whose merits have served to keep out of view the mediocrity of talent and acquirements of a large proportion of the students who enter the corps, denominated, par excellence, scientific.

Indeed, the very constitution of the college forces a large portion of mediocrity into the artillery service. It is universally admitted by teachers that any number of youths being brought together without selection, the probabilities are that not one in four will have any particular aptitude or talent for attaining mathematical knowledge: and, consequently, in a seminary where every student is admitted for the express purpose of being made a superior mathematician, it becomes almost a certainty that more than one half will fall short of the object, and rest at different degrees of mediocrity. Apply the principle to an exclusive college for forming a select body of superior musicians or painters, and the ridicule of the attempt becomes strikingly apparent.

Gen. G.-But to counterbalance this defect, you of course take care to ascertain that the young men have some peculiar aptitude or inclination, or general fitness, for the ordnance service, before they are promoted to officers? English Officer.-In all other professions inclination and aptitude are considered essential to success; but not so in the artillery and engineer profession. The opportunity of a gratuitous education, and gratuitous promotion for a child, is too tempting a bait for a parent to hesitate about such considerations; and the youths themselves are too young to have any opinion on the subject. Indeed, very many join the academy in utter ignorance of the nature of their destination beyond the names of the two ordnance corps; and when the public has educated them, and has given or is about to give them commissions, it is too late to inquire into their matured inclinations or dislikes their good or bad nerves-their greater or less energy of disposition. As you caught them so you must keep them to the end of their lives. Gen. G.-The cost to the public of this confined education, or rather minimum of attainment, is of course very low?

English Officer.-The expense of a cadet's education varies according to the greater or less demand for officers. In the estimates hitherto submitted to Parliament it is very difficult, not to say impracticable, to trace the amount; the charges for the academy being various, and brought forward under a variety of heads which appear to have no connexion with education. For instance, last year, under the vote for the regiment of artillery, the pay of 130 or 140 cadets, at 28. 6d. a day, or about 6000l. a year, is covered, and the amount shifted from the academy to the regiment. Then there are the military and civil contingencies, which cover other large sums; the retired pensions to professors, and masters, and others; the cost of dwellings, and the payment for rates, taxes, coals, candles, stationary, books, instruments, and a variety of other disbursements, such as repairs to buildings, furniture, &c. &c.: but the gross annual outlay at the present moment on account of the Ordnance Academy may be stated in round numbers at 15,0007.

The annual peace demand on the institution for officers, supposing the ordnance corps complete at their present establishment, is calculated at seventeen. Unfortunately, however, there are no means, in an exclusive and gratuitous institution, of regulating the supply to meet the demand. Thus, during the late war, the demand for officers was so great that the course of instruction was necessarily limited to the very rudiments of education, and a lad was passed through in a few months; whereas, in the six years from 1819 to 1824, inclusive, although there were 150 cadets maintained at Woolwich, at an annual expense of 20,000l., there were only twenty-five vacancies altogether in the ordnance corps filled up during those years; and consequently the education of each officer at the latter period cost the public as many thousand pounds as it did hundreds at the former period.

Again, there being no check in a gratuitous institution on the entry and continuance of the students, arising from motives of individual prudence and economy, and every feeling of the patron inclining him to keep the academy as full as possible, it occurred, in 1823, that the number of qualified students became so great that it was deemed expedient, for the purpose of maintaining some spirit of emulation in the institution, that the public should allow thirty or forty cadets, who had long finished their education, the means of subsistence till they could seek out a profession; and it is almost too ridiculous to add, that two years subsequently, on an urgent demand for officers of engineers, most of these gratuitously educated young men had disappeared and qualified candidates could by no possibility be obtained.

Gen. G.-Under the circumstances you have just mentioned, of such a very long residence at the academy, the students must have become very accomplished and have made great advances in general learning?

English Officer.-Here again gratuitous education is fatal. The government paying the cost of the professors and masters, and undervaluing every

branch of instruction, except mathematics and fortification, grudgingly provides or pays for other instruction. Indeed, from this cause, the professors and masters are indifferently rewarded, and are too few to be able to do the justice they desire to the number of cadets under their superintendence.

Professors or lecturers on history, classics, modern languages, the belles lettres, geography, astronomy, geology, mineralogy, (and even chemistry, till last year,) were excluded from the institution, and the youths left the academy with minds rather contracted than expanded by lengthened years of study.

Gen. G.-More and more unintelligible. Well, if gratuitous instruction have a bad effect on the studies of the cadets, and a bad effect in apportioning the supply to the demand, at least it must be beneficial in keeping the corps full of select individuals.

English Officer-It has been shown that gratuitous education necessarily produces a majority of officers of minimum attainments; and the same cause without doubt acts injuriously in fixing the standard of morals and conduct; and it has the further bad effect of causing the retention in the service of very many, who, from dislike, indolence, or declining capacity, become unfit for its duties.

Every effort to get rid of an undeserving individual is met with the objection-" He has been educated at the public expense, and it would be throwing away the whole cost of his education to allow him to retire from the service." And every effort to get rid of an incapable and useless, but otherwise worthy man, is met with the still stronger objection-"What, after having been at the cost of his education, grant him half pay merely because he turns out inefficient?" And this feeling has carried many an undeserving and many an useless individual from the lowest to the highest rank in the service.

Gen. G.-I have heard it stated in your Parliament and admitted without an observation, that it is necessary the public should bear the expense of the education of the artillery and engineer officers, because those officers are not allowed to quit those services.

English Officer.-The reverse of the assertion is the fact. The mastergeneral feels it necessary to confine the officers of artillery and engineers to their particular branches of the military profession, because the country is at the expense of their education. Otherwise the army would be filled with officers thus gratuitously educated, and the eyes of the public being opened as to the unreasonableness of such patronage, the very existence of an Ordnance Academy would be endangered.

This gratuitous education is a curse on the artillery service, and on its officers from youth to old age-operating equally to the prejudice of their feelings, their employment, and their promotion.

At the academy it prevents the discharge of numerous dull youths, as such a proceeding would act more as a punishment on the parent than on the cadet. From the same feeling it pushes hundreds of youths of inferior abilities into the artillery. It is a hindrance to weeding and purifying the junior branches of the service, and is always made an excuse for restriction and injustice to every rank and class of officers.

It even prohibits those who may possess peculiar military talent or enterprize from benefiting themselves and the public by embracing a wider and more congenial field of action; because in youth the artillery officer having been gratuitously educated by the ordnance, the ordnance claim all the energies of his future life, whether their service does or does not offer a proper field for his useful employment.

How many highly accomplished and highly talented men might be named, who, on this senseless claim, have been debarred from rendering valuable services to the state, and been condemned to vegetate through life in inaction, obscurity, and disgust,-victims to gratuitous education and departmental patronage.