The following table shows the cost of two years' service calculated on the same bases as have been assumed above. Two years' service would mean an army with the colours not of 200,000 but of 390,000 men. This would require double the number of officers and sergeants, and the annual estimates for personnel would be £34,000,000, and the total Army Estimates £41,000,000. There would also be a very great extra expenditure upon barracks. Estimate of Annual Cost for Two Years' Service. 13,650 officers at £500 a year £6,825,000 27,300 sergeants at £100 2,730,000 Pension for sergeants' annual class of 27,300, decreasing by 2-1/2 per cent., gives after twenty-five years £12,403; at £52 a year pension is 644,956 390,000 privates at £45 a year 17,550,000 Third year mounted troops, 20,000 at £60 1,200,000 First-class reserve 997,000 Training supplementary officers and sergeants 500,000 ---------- Carry forward £30,446,956 Brought forward £30,446,956 Colonial troops 3,500,000 ---------- Total personnel £33,946,956 _Matériel_, allowing for extra numbers 5,000,000 Staff and administration, allowing for extra numbers 2,000,000 ----------- £40,946,956 =========== XIX. ONE ARMY NOT TWO The training provided in the scheme which I have outlined could be facilitated at comparatively small cost by the adoption of certain preparatory instruction to be given partly in the schools, and partly to young men between the ages of seventeen and twenty. It has never appeared to me desirable to add to the school curriculum any military subjects whatever, and I am convinced that no greater mistake could be made, seeing that schoolmasters are universally agreed that the curriculum is already overloaded and requires to be lightened, and that the best preparation that the school can give for making a boy likely to be a good soldier when grown up, is to develop his intelligence and physique as far as the conditions of school life admit. But if all school children were drilled in the evolutions of infantry in close order, the evolutions being always precisely the same as those practised in the army, the army would receive its men already drilled, and would not need to spend much time in recapitulating these practices, which make no appreciable demand upon the time of school children.