process from which the Bishop of London appears to hope so much has begun under very poor auguries.

But while our expectation of any good from Convocation is feebler than ever, the possibility of Parliamentary action has become, through the spirit lately shown by the House of Commons, a strong probability. It is allowed to us to hope that the nation will once more assert itself as a Christian community, and adapt its public worship to its needs. While dealing justly with all parties, it will no longer think it necessary to reckon at every turn with the sacerdotal party as though its theories had any serious hold upon the national conscience. The two things which it has to do are, first, to make the law which governs these matters, whether rubric or canon, perfectly clear, adapting it in the process to the actual convictions and desires of a Protestant nation; and secondly, to fix upon some power which shall, within a given range, be at liberty to suit the services to local needs. It is not a rigid uniformity which law-abiding men require, but (with a uniformity in essentials) a clear definition of the local authority in whom the discretion rests in all non-essential matters. If this be once made plain, it will be possible to relax to some extent the uniformity, whenever it is felt to be oppressive; and, as by the Elizabethan Act of Uniformity power was given to the Queen to take order as to the Ornaments,' and to ordain further ceremonies and rites with the consent of her Commissioners or of the Metropolitan of the realm, it is possible that now also a discretion for allowing such relaxations as may from time to time be required may be vested in some body deriving its authority from Parliament and acting under its general control.

But whatever is done in the present matter, or in wider questions which may gradually open before us, the essential thing is that it should be done by Parliament itself, as alone capable of acting on behalf of the whole nation and in harmony with its desires. The statesman who shall bring this about, and enable the country, under the new conditions of this century, to exercise its proper control in ecclesiastical affairs, will deserve to rank with those who in the sixteenth century restored the ancient ecclesiastical jurisdiction to the crown of England.

ART. VII.-The Origin and History of the Grenadier Guards. By Lieutenant-General Sir F. W. HAMILTON, late Grenadier Guards. In Three Volumes 8vo. London: 1874.

WHEN General Trochu uttered those criticisms on the Third Napoleon's army which made his name a household word in France, and lifted him into chief power when she broke with the Empire, there was one that drew especial notice in this country. This was his absolute condemnation of élite corps as an integral part of any military force. What is gained in its perfection (so ran his general argument) is gained wholly at the expense of the bulk of the service. It is not possible to pick out of any army a specially good set of soldiers for such a corps, without giving it some material advantages. The temptations that these offer will not only drain from the ordinary regiments members that form their most vital element, but will tend to give the rest a sense of hopeless inferiority and neglect that must cause them insensibly to lose heart in their work. So far had this system of selection been carried in his own service for some seven years before he drew attention to it, that after taking privates away for the Guards, for the Zouave regiments, and finally for the flank companies of their own battalions, it had become a serious difficulty in the mass of the line battalions to find efficient noncommissioned officers; whilst to be among their rank and file was to wear a distinctive badge that a man was good for nothing else. But Guards, or Zouaves, or grenadiers, when under the enemy's fire, are just as likely to fall as other men. Their specially good services will not, therefore, even if they be fully admitted, avail to multiply their comparatively small number; and if to create them should inflict, as he contended, a serious injury on the whole of the army at large, the national account must on the whole be charged with a large loss under this system.

No one now doubts that Trochu was right in his strictures. However ill we may think of his own political or military conduct when the turn of events made him Governor of Paris and President of the Government of Defence, his work still remains unchallenged for its prophetic truth as to the results of the errors it exposed in the military organisation which Europe was wont to admire. Framed for show rather than use, and to give posts of honour and emolument to court favourites rather than to find leaders for the field, the military system of Napoleon III. proved itself under trial one of the most worthless institutions of his Empire, and its fall deservedly

brought with it his own amid the indignation of a great people who had trusted him with all their means in vain. The very apologies the ex-Emperor wrote in his banishment carry his condemnation with them; for throughout the pages of the Wilhelmshöhe and Chiselhurst pamphlets runs the admission that the writer knew and felt keenly the existence of defects which he yet was powerless to correct under the political system that owed its entire framework to himself.

It is false logic, however, that argues from the French example in this matter that an army must of necessity suffer deterioration by the maintenance of select regiments. To take the most patent example of military excellence; we see that the Prussians have deliberately adopted a large Guard Corps as a cherished military institution. The Austrians, on the other hand, for political reasons which only those can appreciate that know the suspicious nature of the reigning family, have always dispensed with any Guard Corps in their large army; yet this has never commended itself as a model for the imitation of other nations. What Trochu denounced was in fact not the creation of an Imperial Guard, or of special regiments of light infantry, but the creation of these at the expense of others. When once the practice is introduced of transferring good soldiers as a reward from their own battalions to élite corps, or from the mass of the regiment to its own flank companies (the latter an old practice in our own service most properly abolished) then indeed the bad effect on those left behind is certain to make itself felt. We have had a truly national warning of the evils of such a system as applied to the officer class in the old Company's Indian army, where the regimental cadres were mercilessly robbed of every man of energy and ability to feed the civil departments or to command irregulars. As a direct consequence those left to do duty with the regular Sepoy regiments were, as a rule, the dross of a large body. Weak often in numbers, these remnants of the cadres were weaker still in military qualities; and the fearful mutiny that almost swept our rule out of the land was the just Nemesis of a system that took away the natural security of a government dependent on a vast force of armed natives, by depriving the body that officered that force of all its best elements. There is no need to criticise this system now. It has condemned itself sufficiently by its results; as did that of which Trochu wrote with such bitter truth in 1867. But the Prussian Guard Corps is founded on a different basis altogether, being recruited direct from civil life all over the kingdom. A higher standard, no doubt, is expected from the men that enter it than from the

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ordinary recruit of the line; and thus it is in trúth an élite body, though not made so by the mistaken process of robbing the ranks of less favoured regiments than its own of their best soldiers.

Thus it is too with our own noble regiments of Foot Guards. Enlistment in the battalions is free, far freer indeed than it could be under any modification of the Prussian system, under which the peasant taken for the Guard Corps in Westphalia or Posen has usually little choice in the matter, and is only interested so far that his new lot changes the site fixed for his involuntary service with the colours. In both services, however, the broad rule is the same; selection out of the great mass of the population of men not already enrolled for duty. And in both the mainspring relied on for excellence is not the test of military training already passed through, but the glorious traditions and hereditary discipline of the body among which the recruit's lot is to be cast. Of each of the services we are for the moment comparing it may be said that its battalions are not creations apart from the army, much less made at its expense, but rather standing models of excellence to other regiments; more identified than these with the history of the land, and more honoured, because they have in their long past done more for its honour than their comrades.

Such is, above all, the case with our own First or Grenadier Regiment of Foot Guards, whose story General Hamilton has undertaken to tell. Objections may be raised to the method of his work as too laborious for such a limited subject as the history of a single corps. It may be said that he has weakened in some degree the interest of his tale by the very labour of love which he has spent upon its details; by the industry which has led him to ransack records new and old, British and foreign, for every particular that could throw light on his subject. The cumbrous illustrations will seem to some overdone. Others may object to the over-carefulness with which he has inserted trifling regimental changes amidst the recital of stirring national events. But the fact is that the History of the Grenadier Guards is a microcosm of that of the whole British army. At once its oldest and most distinguished regiment, it has shared not only its world-wide honour and successes, but those reverses and trials with which the varied history of the standards that have crossed the whole globe is chequered. It witnessed Fontenoy as well as Blenheim; it bore part in the surrender of Yorktown as in Cornwallis's fleeting triumph in Carolina; it retreated before the French through Flanders under York, as it pursued the French through Flanders under

Wellington. And ever in the darker as in the brighter pages of its story, it has maintained the same character for enduring steadfast courage and unshaken discipline, coupled with warm feeling between men and officers; high qualities which, we are proud to believe, are characteristic of the whole British infantry, of which this corps is but the brightest example. For these are the virtues which have drawn praise alike from ally and from foe; which the cold pen of the great Prussian critic who watched them through Waterloo, and the pithy comment of the rough conqueror of Algiers who retreated before them in the Peninsula, have done such full justice to, as patriotic admiration of our brave soldiers may gratefully accept as testimony that none can dispute.

But there is more than this lesson in the work that comes under our notice. For in its chapters may be traced the whole development of the adventurous and active side of our modern polity, which in days of increasing commerce and growing wealth, protected by imperial strength, we are too ready to ignore. We rest on our conquests now. There are some of us, indeed, so blind to history's teachings that they would call our colonies an encumbrance, the policy that reared them a dream, our fierce protests against would-be enslavers of Europe expensive and useless errors. For these men it would be the same had England never reached her armed hand to east or west to protect the adventurous pioneers that went forth to found new Englands where the sun rises and where it sets. The merchant and the manufacturer, they say, would be doing the same work now had we never sent sailor or soldier from our shores. They have forgotten how different the face of this world would have been had Englishmen never lifted arms out of England. Had such counsellors been in power when Chatham lived, Montcalm might have accomplished his dream of the universal domination of France in America, and the Latin race excluded the English from it for generations. Had they ruled later instead of Chatham's great son, half Europe might have still been governed by French prefects, and Ireland have been a hostile republic, threatening us in our vitals at every change of the political horizon. Had they controlled Clive and Clive's successors, India might have been a French dependency, or a mass of semi-barbarous states still, such as it was when we won the foothold, which when once won has grown steadily into an empire by a law we could not control. But their teaching has had little power over the national life, and their doctrines have passed into disrepute. There is little fear nowa-days that Englishmen will yield to foreign rivals what their