with the concession of a boot allowance to the infantry and of free forage to the cavalry; with improved pension regulations; with more liberal travelling allowances to officers; with a grant of free firewood to all ranks; last, though not least, with the better rate of pay which Lord Kitchener had urged incessantly for five years, and which was at length announced in the King's message to the Indian Army last January. Solid and tangible boons like these will serve to butter the parsnips of the native soldier more effectively than any amount of exalted talk.

It has been further suggested that Lord Kitchener has found his most congenial work in the council-chamber rather than on the manoeuvre-ground, and that the plethora of office work has prohibited those frequent inspections and visits which enabled his predecessors to get and keep in close touch with individual regiments. While, as a matter of fact, the Commander-in-Chief has inspected almost every unit under his command, it may well have been delicately represented to him that if the honours of a personal visit are too frequently paid the welcome becomes stereotyped, while the financial strain which they entail on the slender resources of the recipients of this honour may approach snapping-point. On his tours, whenever possible, Lord Kitchener lived in his train, so as not to trespass on traditionally generous regimental hospitality.

That one of Lord Kitchener's chief gifts is a capacity for finance is generally acknowledged. Great soldier as he is, able administrator as he has often shown himself to be, he shines not less conspicuously as a business man and economist. One of the greatest statesmen of our generation formed this estimate of him, which is shared by perhaps the greatest of living financiers. It would almost need a separate article to set forth adequately the financial bearings of Lord Kitchener's Indian reforms, and it must suffice here to mention one or two of the leading points.

The inception of the reorganisation policy happily coincided with a period of Indian prosperity. Lord Kitchener's detractors are fond of saying that in this respect he had the luck denied to others that his predecessors would have done what he did, if only they had had the money. This, if true, should at least put an end to the censorious comments of those who blame him for the methods of his expenditure. The two criticisms are mutually

destructive. Lord Kitchener, as a man of business, cuts his coat according to his cloth. In the years of prosperity he urged the undertaking of the large expenditure needed to satisfy special requirements. Such is his finance in a nutshell-to take advantage of the fat years to obtain a special grant of limited duration to meet certain urgent needs, and in the succeeding lean years to curtail expenditure wherever possible, and bring the normal military budget back to its former level, or even lower.

A few details may be given by way of illustration. The reorganisation schemes were financed by a special fixed annual grant, which ceases this year. The aggregate grant for five years was considerably under £10,000,000 sterling, the amount spent less than £8,250,000.

The expenditure of the special grant comes under three heads:

1. All special expenditure outside the reorganisation of the personnel. An outlay of rather more than £4,500,000 covers various items, of which rearming the artillery cost £1,750,000; ordnance machinery, &c., £200,000; buildings, &c., £600,000; coast defence £432,000, and so on.

2. The initial cost of the reorganisation scheme, including (a) less than £1,000,000 for purchase of land and building operations; and (b) a sum of under £2,000,000 for preparation for

war.

3. The recurring cost of the reorganisation scheme, which amounts to over three-quarters of a million. The present year sees economies effected to the extent of £320,000.

It is important to note certain facts:

(1) That recourse to "special" expenditure was in vogue before Lord Kitchener's time. During the five years preceding those just named a sum of nearly six millions was thus allotted.

(2) That, but for the cost of rearming the artillery, the

Kitchener five-years total would have been not far from three-quarters of a million less than that of the corre sponding pre-Kitchener period.

(3) That the advent of the lean years has been marked by a vigorous handling of the pruning-knife, involving the

curtailment of building schemes, the discharge of workmen, and the postponement of certain projects to a financially more propitious moment.

(4) That a comparison of the last Kitchener budget with the last of the pre-Kitchener budgets shows that, while the soldiers are receiving considerably higher pay, the cost of their service in the Army is actually less.

(5) That on the financial side the principle of devolution works particularly well. The fixing beforehand of a maximum expenditure has taught the soldiers that economy is a military interest, and has accustomed them to make sure that essential outlay shall not be sacrificed to what is merely desirable.

(6) The creation of the Military Finance Branch of the

Finance Department the selection of high Treasury officials to act as financial experts in aid of the Army authorities-has, as Lord Kitchener says, brought two great Government departments together as allies, and given the financial authorities a sympathetic insight into the real requirements of the Army."

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Lord Kitchener is one of those great workmen who may well be content that final judgment of their work should be deferred until, in the clearer light and calmer atmosphere of the future, its true value can be accurately appraised. Strenuous work is to him as the air he breathes, and although in official and in private letters the distinguished soldier has pleaded with something of pathos that for upwards of a quarter of a century he has enjoyed no sort of holiday, he is evidently prepared to be translated without any respite from one sphere of action to another.

Whatever may be the duties attaching to his new post, or whatever still more important and better-defined functions are destined to devolve upon him, Lord Kitchener may well feel that no labour of his life can more justly or more abundantly earn the Euge of his countrymen than the work of much-needed military reform which he has steadily prosecuted in India.

GEORGE ARTHUR.

GREATER BRITAIN AND INDIA

CANADIAN AFFAIRS

1

MR. MACPHAIL'S "Essays on Politics" is one of the most interesting and instructive books Canada has produced in the last decade, and for all that much of it presents the spectacle of the academic-the superior person by profession-engaged in kicking against the pricks of actuality, no conscientious student of Canadian tendencies can afford to ignore it. The author, who is a medical professor in McGill University, has an entertaining record in transatlantic literature and journalism. His "Essays in Puritanism," which made his name infamous among the cosmopathists and other intellectual cranks in Boston but famous in every other city of the American soul, was a wise and witty indictment of that ethical "look-see," which is the causa causans of nearly all the social diseases peculiar to the United States and has gone far to create the impression among disinterested observers that that big self-centred country is a China in becoming. On settling for better or worse in the Dominion Mr. Macphail became Editor of the University Magazine, the only literary periodical in the country, which has done more than any other publication to persuade the people of Canada that England has been the mother, not the stepmother, of the over-seas Dominions which are slowly but surely diverging from the insular inexpugnable community that gave birth to them. And none of the carefully written, conscientiously reasoned articles, which have appeared in that magazine, are more deserving of a longer lease of life than Mr. Macphail's political essays, half-sermon and half-psalm and always the work of an artist in words-half-poet and halfLongmans: London. Price 68.

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rhetorician-which are collected in this unostentatious volume, to be purchased for the price of an ordinary novel.

But wit and wisdom in a written form are so cheap in these latter days, and mere cleverness-of which there is enough and to spare in his book-is so very much cheaper, that Mr. Macphail's political philosophy would not be indispensable but for the fact that it gives, unconsciously and unreservedly, a true picture of a certain type of the Canadian mind. That the Canadian type of character differs essentially from the American almost as widely as from the English will not be denied by those who have a real knowledge of the three countries-Canada, the United States, and England-which have produced the types in question. The English tourist who makes a hasty journey through the Dominion and the Republic is apt to believe that the Canadian is merely a variant of the American; even if he has a gift for the study of folk-psychology and is dimly conscious of subtle points of differences below the surface-the superficial resemblances in dress, speech, business methods, &c.—he invariably returns home with a strong impression that the international boundary is almost as imaginary as the equator, and that, socially speaking, there is a marked tendency for the two types to converge. Hence all the talk, only heard in the Mother Country, of the "Americanisation" of Canada, Canadian institutions, and Canadian characters. But those who have actually lived both in Canada and the United States are convinced that there is no truth whatever in this theory, though they are not always able to give reasons for their conviction.

The key to the problem of defining "Canadianism" (which even Mr. Sanford Evans has not succeeded in doing) is to be found in the philosophic consideration of environment, the position in space and in time of the typical Canadian. In the first place Canada was and still is a chain of settlements along the verge of an unconquered wilderness. If he does not enter this land of unnamed lakes and uncharted forests and unploughed prairies and untouched mines in quest of a fortune (to be enjoyed by posterity, not by himself), he resorts thither for his summer or autumn holiday. What the voice of the sea was to the Elizabethan Englishman, the call of the wilds is to the twentieth-century Canadian. The English tourist