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which Edwards, as might be anticipated, replies in kind; and there are references to Richardson's troubles with the Irish pirates, Messrs. Exshaw, Wilson, and Saunders. Richardson seems to have been anxious to induce his friend to follow up the Canons by some more extended critical or editorial work. He suggested that he should edit his "ever-honoured Spenser," a new edition of whom was in contemplation. But Edwards was not to be persuaded. He knew his own limitations, and he shrank from the responsibilities of the task. His standard of editing was as high as that afterwards so amply outlined by Johnson in his Proposals of 1755, and he was as heartily sick of the hidebound Warburtons and Bentleys as he was of the vamped-up subscription issues of the booksellers, with their obtrusive typography and their copperplates "made in Holland." Richardson next tried to tempt him with Pope-with a rival edition to that of Warburton. But here Edwards's objections were even stronger. Though he had formerly been actually in communication with Pope, and admired him as a poet, he did not care for him as an individual. If, as he argued, he was to take off the patches with which Warburton had tinkered the Essay on Man, matters would not therefore be mended. Then again (and this was unanswerable), Warburton had Pope's papers. In all this, it is probable that lack of authorities and opportunity had more influence than lack of ability. Editing was a work," to use his own words, "not to be done with a wet finger." And it is obvious from his later letters that his health was steadily failing. He died, aged fifty-eight, after a short illness, on January 3, 1757, when visiting Richardson at Parson's Green; and he was buried in Ellesborough churchyard under a lengthy epitaph by his nephews and heirs. One of his last sonnets was addressed to the sexton of the parish, whom he adjured to guard his " monumental hillock" from "trampling cattle "-an illustration of the days when God's acre was used as a grazing ground.* Thomas Edwards was a worthy, amiable, well-educated gentleman, with an inherent love of books. His literary record is not large, or lasting. But it is something to have smitten the Goliath of pedantry with the pebble of common sense: something, also, to have made a sustained attempt to revive the sonnet of Milton under the sovereignty of Pope.

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* Cp. Gay's Shepherd's Week, 1714, p. 49.

AUSTIN DOBSON

ADMIRALTY REORGANIZATION

A SOLDIER'S VIEW

THE new First Lord of the Admiralty has the good wishes of his countrymen in the responsible task that he has undertaken. His record during the war has been a fine one, considering the remarkable successes that he achieved in the Munitions Ministry and afterwards in connexion with utilizing railway communications in this country and in developing them in rear of the British Front in France. During the short period that he occupied the post of Controller in Whitehall he is, moreover, understood to have effected certain salutary reforms, the results of which will become apparent before many months are past. Nor will a public, taught by bitter experience during the past three years to distrust the politician, feel any less confidence in Sir E. Geddes because he does not happen to be tarred with that particular brush.

His announcement in the course of his address at Cambridge, on being elected Member of Parliament, that he has no intention of interfering in the conduct of operations indicates a full recognition of what must always be a fundamental principle of Admiralty organization. We have had enough, and more than enough, of the amateur strategist since this war began. Antwerp, the Dardanelles, and the deplorable misapplication of force at Salonika, have been the result of civilian interference in the work of sailors and soldiers. There is no objection to a civilian Minister at the head of the Admiralty or of the War Office, always provided that he understands his place and confines his activities to the duties that fall properly within his province. The plan is indeed not without certain advantages, quite apart from the constitutional peculiarities that obtain in this country and that make the arrangement a convenient one. Nor does it follow, because a

civilian chief of the Admiralty must on no account meddle in the management of operations of war, that he is debarred from doing what he can to ensure full use being made of such professional ability as is available. It is a matter of common knowledge that Sir E. Geddes' very distinguished predecessor set himself to develop the War Staff in Whitehall, realizing that this all-important branch of the department was not getting full value out of the abundant brain-power at its command. But Sir E. Carson's work was cut short before he had finished it by his translation into the War Cabinet. We may surely rely on its being completed?

It is an interesting fact that when the Esher Triumvirate (which included Lord Fisher) reconstituted the War Office, the Admiralty was taken for model. Lord Esher and his colleagues set up the Army Council, which at least in theory corresponded to the Board of Admiralty. But the creation of the Army Council was not the most signal achievement of the three reformers. The most valuable and the most revolutionary of the changes that they initiated was the establishment of the General Staff, an organization for which no equivalent existed in the rival institution. A War Staff has, it is true, become part of the Admiralty since those days; but this War Staff in reality represents at present little more than the skeleton of what such a department should be. Its Operations Division is hardly a thinking branch in the true sense of the word. It does not form the nucleus of a comprehensive organization permeating the Royal Navy as a whole. It has not secured that complete control over training establishments that the General Staff Department of the War Office exercises as a matter of course. It lacks, or at all events it lacked until very recently, the authority that such a department must be invested with if it is to fulfil its true function in peace and in war.

The First Report of the Dardanelles Commission has exposed the Admiralty methods and organization that were at work on an occasion when what was manifestly an operations question was under consideration in Whitehall in the Churchill era. Although the problem of forcing the Hellespont was essentially a strategical and tactical one, it appears that the Chief of the War Staff was not admitted to the deliberations of the War

Council. Expert naval opinion was represented on that body by the First Sea Lord, as was right and proper, but it was further represented by a very senior Admiral, Sir A. Wilson, who had no regular post and who was, therefore, burdened with no responsibility. The working out in detail of the method of attack adumbrated by Admiral Carden was entrusted to another very senior Admiral, Sir H. Jackson, who happened to be doing odd jobs in Whitehall. It is, moreover, suggestive that Commodore Lambert, Fourth Sea Lord at the time, expressed the view to the Commission that the question of attacking the Dardanelles ought to have been discussed by the Board of Admiralty-and there is justice in this contention, seeing that the true status of the War Staff was not understood and that its executive functions, such as they were, seem to have been in abeyance.

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Had the Admiralty been properly constituted at the time, the details of the plan would have been examined and have been worked out by the War Staff; and the War Staff, not the Board of Admiralty, would have been professionally responsible for recommending or for deprecating its adoption. If that course had been adopted, and if the War Staff had been organized on suitable lines, it is safe to say that the officers especially charged with the task would have been in close communication with their opposite numbers " on the General Staff in the War Office. Supposing that the sailors who were drawing up the report had by any chance not detected the grave objections that presented themselves to embarking on such a venture, their military colleagues would assuredly have pointed these out, for they were fairly obvious; and it would have been strange if the whole scheme had not there and then been pronounced to be too unpromising and too hazardous to proceed with. Still, with a First Lord so wayward and assertive as Mr. Churchill, and with a First Sea Lord so disinclined to keep the politicians in their place as Lord Fisher, no perfection of organization nor amplitude of professional investigation on the part of the War Staff would necessarily have deterred the War Council from arriving at the fatuous decision that they did.

When dealing with the War Office the Esher Committee rightly attached the utmost weight to securing decentralization, and to defining very clearly the duties that were to be performed

by each of the various branches into which they split the existing organization up. They claimed in doing so to be following Admiralty procedure. But they do not seem to have taken note of a feature in the War Office system as they found it, which in spite of the many glaring defects of that system made the War Office, even as it stood, in some respects a more soundly managed institution than was the institution that they had taken as their pattern. Even so far back as 1904 decentralization was practised at Army Headquarters in some important directions to an extent that is unknown at Naval Headquarters to this day. Junior staff officers in the War Office have for many years past enjoyed-a real responsibility in connexion with subjects that they deal with. They are empowered to give decisions within reasonable limits. There is devolution of authority, and devolution of authority is a principle that is little countenanced in the Royal Navy.

Members of Sir I. Hamilton's staff during the Dardanelles campaign were astounded at the centralization that they observed in the Sister Service. They found naval officers of standing, officers who were clearly occupying important and responsible positions, kept in leading-strings to an extent that a half-baked subaltern in the Army hardly has to put up with. Admirals seemed to have no peace. They were perpetually being worried for authority to carry out some twopenny-halfpenny service, the requests often emanating from sailors of rank and ample experience who were commanders of great ships of war with complements of hundreds of men. This kind of centralization is no doubt a matter of tradition in the sea service, of tradition coming down from the days of Hawke and Hood and Nelson, and as such it is entitled to respect. It certainly does not breed disinclination to assume responsibility in our naval officers when no senior happens to be about. Your sub-lieutenant revels in responsibility when he is "on his own." But the results are unfortunate when admirals and post-captains and commanders and lieutenants are all penned up together in a huge Department of State like the Admiralty in Whitehall.

In no great office are the best brains necessarily to be found at the top. The higher officials are presumably fortified by experience, and their judgment will have ripened with years.

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