Here then we must notice the first flagrant instance of a besetting sin, which, practically from the very beginning up to the present time, has afflicted and still afflicts the House of Commons. No sooner is the country at peace than it raises a cry for the reduction of the Army. In the eighteenth century this cry was very much a matter of faction. The Whigs had always bitterly opposed a standing army under the Stuarts, when they thought it adverse to their interests; and the Tories naturally conceived a mortal detestation of it after it had become a weapon in the hands of the Whigs. Thus both parties were committed to general discouragement of the force; and any member who desired to pose as a champion of liberty could do so effectively by denouncing the evils of a standing army. It has been my hard fate to wade through a prodigious number of speeches upon this subject, and I have been absolutely nauseated by their hollowness and cant. It is of course possible for a man to object sincerely and conscientiously to any description of army; but I have never met with such a one in the Parliamentary debates of the eighteenth century. Their abuse of standing armies, in which was generally mixed some vituperation of the military profession at large, was simply hypocrisy and cant, most mischievous and dangerous, inasmuch as it brought the calling of a soldier into contempt, and kindled the entire civil population into hostility with the military. Compelled to reduce the Army to a mere handful of men, William sought to turn this handful to the best account by keeping the skeletons of a great many regiments, which might on emergency be filled out with additional men, rather than a very few complete regiments ready to take the field at once. He was quite right; and his example has repeatedly been followed down to our own days; but the system of skeleton regiments means always unreadiness for war. In the haste and urgency of the first hostilities all the trained men are swept into a few battalions, so as to fill up their empty ranks; those few battalions are sent into action; in six months they are so much reduced by losses as to be ineffective; and you are left with nothing but recruits who need two or three years to convert them into soldiers. This has happened again and again, and the first instance of it came in 1701. In November 1700 the acceptance of the throne of Spain for his grandson by Louis XIV roused all Europe to arms; and Louis to secure his object invaded Spanish Flanders, surrounded several towns which were occupied, under the Treaty of 1697, by Dutch troops, and so cut off fifteen thousand of William's best men. Under a former treaty of alliance with Holland England was bound to furnish to her ten thousand men, and both Houses of Parliament prepared faithfully to fulfil the obligation. Twelve battalions were accordingly ordered to the Low Countries from Ireland, eked out of course by a great many young