Suggest if Prime Minister takes no immediate action he may be asked that the Committee in self-defence be allowed to make correspondence public as already I am hearing from influential friends that we are discredited by having made exaggerated and unjustifiable statements and that besides the scandalous and disparaging words of the Secretary of State in the House of Commons that the Prime Minister has more or less disavowed us by the tenour of his remarks.... I venture to suggest to you that it is a great mistake for our Committee to be made a catspaw to suit Cabinet susceptibilities or parliamentary wirepulling and that we press for a full and complete publication. * * * * * 1904. _May 26th._ ... Arnold-Forster spent several hours here with me yesterday and he is coming again to-day discussing his difficulties. I tell him he can’t expect his Council all at once to possess the attributes of the Board of Admiralty (which he so intensely admires) which began in 1619! They want to be educated. The individual Members are far too subservient now and do not realise they are administrative members and _not_ Army Officers. They must go about in plain clothes and a tall hat, and order Field Marshals about like schoolboys!... * * * * * 1904. _June 17th._ ... It would have been simply disastrous to have had an increased Army Vote. Has Clarke ever come to close quarters with you as to his project for getting the Army Estimates down to 23 millions? for that is really the figure which represents the proportionate part of the total sum which I make out to be available for the fighting services, and unless some such figure can be arrived at for the Army, I do not think the British Public will face the reduction in the Navy Estimates _which I see to be possible with the increased efficiency_; because they will rightly argue that the Navy is the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th _ad infinitum_ line of defence, and it is simply monstrous therefore that the bloated Army should starve the essential Navy.... It is this Army Vote that absolutely blocks me, because I am perfectly certain it will wreck us unless it can be brought down to some such figure as 23 millions at the outside. That N.-W. Frontier of India is the bug-bear which has possessed the whole lot of our present rulers! and there is no “advocate of the devil” to plead the other side. So I hope you will put that mind of yours to work to make the Prime Minister see his mission to cut down the Army Vote to 23 millions and _then_ we can go ahead and get that threepenny income tax we all so long for _and which we can get if we like_! * * * * * 1904.