‘The Volunteer movement,’ he said, ‘never stood higher in the estimation of the military authorities than it did now. The behaviour of the Volunteers showed that the spirit of the nation was as high as it ever was, and the question was how to utilize this fine material to the best advantage. Conscription was out of the question at present, and the only alternative was the extension of the Volunteer movement for the securing of efficiency for all who joined.’ This perception carries us a long way from 1859 and the Halifax Rifle Corps. We reach in the new century and the new reign, and in the brief peace after the South African War, the problem, or series of problems, which were honestly attacked, if not, as we have seen, fully solved, by the Territorial and Reserve Forces Act of 1907. But note the continuity of the history, and the secure foundation of that Act on material already existing. The Territorial scheme, like the British Constitution, grew up and developed by its own strength; it was never imposed from without. Herein lay the secret of such measure of success as it achieved. The war in South Africa had revealed grave defects in military resources and in the means of national defence. ‘Conscription was out of the question at present,’ but the war of 1914 found the counties of Great Britain at least organized for an emergency which surpassed in its demands and its extent the most serious anticipations of the most foresightful. And the organization (this is the important point) was based on a tradition which could not fail. Everywhere in England, not in Halifax alone, had been men of public spirit, like Edward Akroyd, to petition their worshipful mayor on behalf of the Volunteer movement. Everywhere in England, for fifty years, the Volunteers had drilled and camped, had exchanged their shakoes for busbies, and their muzzle-loaders for breech-loaders, and had converted public ridicule into tolerance, and tolerance into appreciation, and appreciation at last into heartfelt gratitude to the ‘people’s army’ which sprang from English soil. We turn the old pages of _Punch_, and smile at John Leech’s pictures of ‘The Brook-Green Volunteers’ and others; but behind our laughter is the sense that these long-ago, long-whiskered men were the true makers and only begetters of the Territorial Army in the Great War, and that Edward Akroyd and the hundred and nineteen who signed the resolution of enrolment at the public meeting in Halifax Town Hall on June 3rd, 1859, showed the way to the fighting men of the West Riding who helped Marshal Foch and Earl Haig to turn the tide of German advance in the summer of 1918.