Assuredly we have no reason or wish to undervalue the greatness of English courage. That quality alone will turn the scale when the match is otherwise equal. Our wild and rude ancestors, who opposed the landing of the legions of Cæsar, were certainly not one whit inferior in courage or in strength to their descendants, and yet those qualities could not save them from being utterly routed by the discipline of the Italian invaders. It may be questioned whether, in the case of a sudden emergency, the British population at the present day could offer so formidable a resistance to a regularly disciplined force. The odds are that they could not. The aboriginal British tribes, like our Highlanders in last century, were trained to the use of arms, however simple, and versed in some kind of tactics, however rude. They knew how to stand by each other, and they were not terrified by the sight of blood. Whereas the modern operative, suddenly summoned from the factory to take his place as a national defender, would be of all creatures the most incompetent and helpless. To mount a horse, or rather, to guide a horse when he had mounted it, would be to him a thing impossible. He would as lieve thrust his hand into the flames as attempt to fire a cannon. His ideas as to the distinction between the but-end and the muzzle of a musket are so extremely indefinite, that you might as well arm him at once with a boomerang; and the odds are, that, in masticating a cartridge, he would consider it part of his duty to swallow the ball. Or, supposing that his piece is adequately loaded and primed, what is the betting that he does not bring down a comrade instead of disabling an enemy? A random shot strikes the midriff of Higgins, who has just patriotically rushed from the manufacture of _domestics_ to do his duty on the battle-field. He falls gasping in his gore; and Simpkins, who is his right-hand man, grows pale as death, and is off in the twinkling of a billy-roller. A single bivouac, on a frosty night, would send half the awkward squad to the hospital shivering with ague. Those who had previously pinned their faith on Hogarth's caricature of the spindle-shanked Frenchman toasting frogs on the point of his rapier, would speedily discover their mistake at the apparition of the grim, bearded, and bronzed veterans of Algeria, armed to the teeth, and inflamed with that creditable "morale," of which so much has been said, but which resolves itself simply into a burning desire for vengeance on "perfidious Albion." They would then begin, though rather late, to perceive the advantages of preparation, discipline, and science, and bitterly to regret that they had turned a deaf ear so long to the warnings of wisdom and experience. Discipline is as powerful now, in strategy, as it was nineteen hundred years ago. The cotton-clad Briton would not be one whit more able to repel invasion than his remote skin-clad progenitor. And as for a leader,