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re-organized at home. This expeditionary force, working in conjunction with the navy, will be able to operate at a distance for the defence of the Empire as a whole. Behind that, which I call the first line, our conception is a second line consisting of those home defence troops of which I have spoken. The events of a few years ago showed that the Empire could act as a whole, and that in a supreme emergency these home defence forces would pour forth for the defence of something more than their own shores. But that rests upon voluntary effort and not upon any rigid pattern. Our main purpose in bringing this subject before you to-day is to emphasize the desirability so far as possible that these home forces of the various selfgoverning dominions of the Crown should be organized, if not to a common pattern —because rigidity of pattern we recognise is impossible with the varying circumstances of the various countries—yet with a common end in view and with this common conception. At home we may have our territorial Army, if the scheme before Parliament just now goes through. That would be our second line. At home you, Sir Wilfrid, have your Canadian Militia, a creation which may be said in its function and purpose very much to correspond with what is in our mind in the territorial Army. Mr. Deakin has the same idea in his mind in organization, and I think Sir Joseph Ward has also, and I believe the same idea is in the minds of the South African Premiers. So that it seems to me we have all of us got the broad idea of this distinction between the first, or expeditionary force, and the second or home defence line in our heads. If it were well worked out, if the fact is made to correspond to the idea, then it seems to me the Empire would be defended as no other nation in the world is defended, because its resources would be available from so many quarters. But in order to work on a common pattern it is necessary that we should have a common conception, and the common conception, a matter of great intricacy and great complication when you get to details, can only adequately be supplied by the most skilled advisers, and that is where the utility of the General Staff comes in. My main purpose in addressing the Conference is to suggest for your acceptance the opinion that the General Staff which we have created at home and which is in its infancy should receive as far as possible an Imperial character. I will define what I mean. Tt is not that we wish in the slightest degree even to suggest that you should bow your heads to any direction from home in military matters, but the General Staff officer would have as his function this : Trained in a great common school, recruited, it may be, from the most varying parts of the Empire, but educated in military science according to common principles, he would be at the disposition of the local government or of the local Commander - in - Chief, whether he were Canadian, British, or Australian, or New Zealander, or South African, for giving advice and furnishing information based upon the highest military study of the time. The General Staff is a class by itself in the Army. It is so with the German Army, and it is so with the Japanese Army, it has just become so in the Russian Army, and it is so in the French Army. It consists of the most highly trained officers, picked men recruited for their known capacity, specially trained, and then detailed to be at the elbow of the commanding officer. The commanding officer, according to the theory of the General Staff, is unfettered; he has the complete power of accepting or disregarding the advice of his General Staff officer, but he has at his elbow somebody who is there with knowledge, with suggestion, with advice, furnished with all the resources which are supplied from the central school from which the General Staff officer comes, namely, the headquarters of the General Staff. If I may put it a little mow in concrete, I will take an illustration, if I may, founded in Canada. In Canada you have made some

fj~[ Military {Tjf Defence. ;■ (Mr. BUdaae.)