Yet active service is by no means necessary to cure the officer who is bored with military service at home. Send him away to some outlandish corner of the Empire, and entrust him with the training and command of a few hundred black soldiers, and he will find exile, hardship and discomfort more congenial to him in such company than the softest of lives at home. He realises that everything, so far as those few hundred men are concerned, depends upon himself; and he delights in the sensation. There are hundreds of such officers in remote places quietly doing what some consider the dirty work, but what they themselves know to be the most honourable work, of the Empire. The officers of the Indian Army are in precisely the same case. Few of us realise how much we owe to them, and to how great an extent the Empire is dependent upon them. Operatives in our huge over-grown towns, who exhaust themselves in condemnation of everything military, never reflect that, but for this handful of officers, their comrades of the Indian Army, and the disciplined men, Indian too, but above all British, who serve under them, millions of themselves who subsist upon our trade with India would be in a state of starvation. Happily the officers, and therefore the men who serve under them, do their duty patiently and quietly without regarding the volumes of chatter which flow unceasingly from the north country; for they know that empires are won and governed not by talk but by action. This, I think, is a thing that we should all do well to remember from time to time. Exaggerated esteem for our Parliamentary institutions has led us to attach too much importance to speeches. Their original purpose was to persuade men to a common course of action; but they have never been very efficacious, and in this country have long been superseded by political organisation or, in plain English, wire-pulling. People have a strange notion that, without much chatter, there can be no liberty. But liberty (whatever liberty may be) is a small thing to a nation compared with discipline; and in fact liberty of any kind is impossible without discipline. If I am to judge of a nation it is useless to tell me of its political institutions, for the best of them will work badly and the worst of them well according to the honesty of the men whose business it is to apply them. Let me know what is the state of its discipline, parental, social, national, and with what spirit that discipline is borne. Let me know what are its military institutions, and how far they are supported or ignored; whether the citizens come forward with cheerfulness to fulfil a national duty, or whether they are reckless, self-indulgent shirkers who try to impose on a few the service that is common to all, and take refuge in cant to disguise their cowardice. Then I will tell you without reading a single speech whether the nation is sound at heart or rotten. If the text of all the speeches ever