competent general of our own, he asked Frederick to provide one; and thus for the first time British troops were placed under the command of a foreign general for service on the Continent. Few people know anything of the campaigns of Ferdinand of Brunswick, though they are distinguished by two of the finest performances of the British soldier: of the infantry at Minden, and of the cavalry at Warburg. And the reason of this is that, as I have said, the expedition, so far as England was concerned, was a diversion to help her to the conquest of the Empire. That conquest proceeded apace during the years 1759 to 1762, and by the end of the latter year we had expelled the French from Canada, India and the West Indies, besides depriving the Spaniards of Havana and Manila. The process demanded a great number of troops, for seventy-five per cent. of the men in the West Indies died or were incapacitated for further service, and it is here that we strike the weak point of Pitt's military administration. The great Minister saw the importance of reorganising the Militia, though as a matter of fact he never enforced his own scheme of passing all able-bodied men through the ranks--or in other words of instituting national service. But he never matured nor even considered (so far as we can discover) any sound scheme for maintaining the voluntary army that was serving abroad. His only plan was to name a certain sum for bounty, and scatter broadcast commissions to any individuals who would undertake to raise independent companies or regiments. In this way the nominal strength of the Army was brought up to one hundred and fifty battalions of infantry and thirty-two of cavalry, the numbered regiments of infantry being as many as one hundred and twenty-four. Comparatively few of these new regiments survived, because they had been formed simply and solely to be broken up immediately and drafted into other battalions. But what did this mean? It meant in the first place that hundreds of officers went about the country trying to make money out of the recruiting business by obtaining recruits for less than the prescribed bounty, and pocketing the difference. It meant secondly that crimps arose by the score who contracted to supply recruits to these officers, of course at a considerable profit to themselves, and that thus there were so to speak two middlemen to be paid out of the bounty as well as the recruit. The inevitable result was that the country paid vast sums to obtain worn-out old men, half-witted lads and weedy boys, who were absolutely useless in the field, and served only to fill graves and hospitals. Moreover, it was saddled with the obligation of giving half-pay to field-officers, captains and even subalterns, who had gained their rank by the simple process of a bargain with the crimps. Meanwhile the recruits, being enlisted not for some old corps with a regimental history and a regimental pride of its own,