A—s

104

Fourth Day. 20 April 1907.

reference to the exchange of officers representing our General Staff and those of the General Staff of this country, exactly fits in with another request which we intended to prefer. This was that officers of higher standing than those which have hitherto been exchanged should be exchanged. It has been pressed upon me by my colleague that, if possible, these officers should not simply be attached to other men in this country of the same rank who are doing the work. We wish, if possible, that our men should be put to do the work; they may fail or they may do it imperfectly and that will have fo be provided against, but we believe that without the actual pressure of active responsibility upon them you will not test their capacity and they will not learn the limits of their own knowledge. In the matter of interchange, I think you will find the most cordial approbation of your proposition from the Commonwealth and its Defence Department. There is a question to which you have not referred, a minor question, but which arises in that connection with regard to the relative rank of officers in the forces of the Outer Empire and the forces of the Inner Empire. On this we hope to have the advantage of your counsel. As to the establishment of military schools, in that respect as in others, we are envious of the advance of our friends in Canada, and recognise that the course they have taken is one dictated by sound policy and experience. Our own difficulty is that the establishment of a true military college implies a minimum number of regular students year by year, whom at present we hardly see our way to obtain, because of the want of adequate opportunities for such a number afterwards within our own forces. We appreciate the high class training which is obtainable in this country. It is more up-to date than we could expect to be, but at the same time our circumstances a re special. Take first of all the task of self-defence which is touched upon in that very valuable memorandum. The defence of Australia means operations at such distances relatively to those of the United Kingdom, such enormous distances among a population, except upon the coast, so sparse, with difficulties of transport, transit, and concentration, all of them so absolutely altered by scale and circumstance from those of this country that, for the purposes of our own operations within the Commonwealth, the training of your colleges would require to be supplemented by practical training of our own. That raises particular issues upon which it would not be proper to detain you now, but it is perhaps as well to mention some of them. The need of adaptation is especially manifest in a democratic country such as ours, in which the officers are "chosen from all classes, in which eighty-nine onehundredths of them, like ninety-nine one-hundredths of our citizen forces, are composed of men who earn their own livelihoods by other callings. They devote their spare hours to defence purposes, and that earnestly, as well as most generously, becoming more effective in fact than they might appear to be, judging them merely by the tests of military parades. In Australia we have been rather subject to mockery because we have followed so closely some methods of the Imperial forces. As fast as they are Germanised we Germanised, until some military experts have criticized us for failing to adapt our drill and operations to the country in which our men will require to act, dwelling too much upon getting them upon parade in exact line, at the exact angle, with the proper cap and belt. I admit that probably we are open to some of these criticisms, but are beginning to realise that there must be a greater amount of adaptation to our particular circumstances. The question of military education generally is serious. We see our way to what those who advise us on these matters tell us is a sufficient military training for the men, with little alteration in our present system, mainly because none of our men are pressed men, all are volunteers, who join because they have an enthusiasm for the work. The consequence is

Military Defence. (Mr. Deakin.)