There are advantages as well as disadvantages in the voluntary system by which our Army is raised and maintained. As an advantage may be set first the spirit of the men; having enlisted voluntarily, and ascertained by experience that they must make the best of it or be considered utterly worthless, men in a voluntary army gain a spirit that conscripts can never attain. They are soldiers of their own free will, with regimental traditions to maintain, and practice has demonstrated that they form the finest fighting body, as a whole, among all the armies of the world. On the other hand, they have no political significance, and are but little understood, as regards their needs and the constitution of the force to which they belong. In France, for instance, the rule is “every citizen a soldier,” and it is a rule which is observed with but very few exceptions. The result is that every citizen who has been a soldier is also a voter, and in the matter of army requirements he votes in an understanding way, while the British voter, with the exception of the small percentage who have served in the Army, is as a rule unmoved by Army needs and questions. To this extent the Army suffers from the voluntary system, though the quality of the Army itself under present voluntary conditions may be held to compensate for this. It is doubtful whether it does compensate. Further, the voluntary system makes of life in the ranks a totally different thing from civilian life. In conscript armies the discipline to which men are subjected makes their life different from that of their civilian days, but not to such an extent as in the voluntary British Army. The civilian can never quite understand the soldier; Kipling came nearer than any other civilian in his understanding, but even he failed altogether to appreciate the soldier of to-day--perhaps he had a better understanding of the soldier of the ’eighties and ’nineties, before the South African war had come to awaken the Army to the need for individual training and the development of initiative. However that may be, no man has yet written of the soldier as he really is, because the task has been usually attempted by civilians, to whom the soldier rarely shows his real self. Soldiers have themselves given us glimpses of their real life, but usually they have specialised on the dramatic and the picturesque. It is necessary, if one would understand the soldier and his inner life, that one should have a grasp of the monotony of soldiering, the drill and riding school, the barrack-room routine, and all that makes up the daily life, as well as the exceptional and picturesque.