o a source from which the army may be most economically reinforced.

The principal difficulty experienced by military reformers in their
endeavours to remodel the British Army on the Continental system, is
that caused by the necessity of providing troops for the defence of our
vast and scattered Colonial Empire. Without taking into consideration
India, our European and North American possessions, a considerable
portion of the army has to be employed in furnishing garrisons for the
Cape Colony, Natal, Mauritius, St. Helena, the Bermudas, the West
Indies, Burmah, the Straits Settlements, Hong Kong, etc.; which
garrisons, though creating a constant drain on the Home Establishment,
are notoriously inadequate for the defence of the various colonies in
which they are placed; and the result is that, whenever a colonial war
breaks out, fresh battalions have to be hurriedly sent out from the
United Kingdom at immense expense, and the entire military machine is
temporarily disarranged.

In size, and in diversity of subject races, the British Empire may be
not inaptly compared with that of Rome in its palmiest days; and we
have, in a measure, adopted a Roman scheme for the defence of a portion
of our dominions. The Romans were accustomed, as each new territory was
conquered, to raise levies of troops from the subject race, and then,
most politicly, to send them to serve in distant parts of the Empire,
where they could have no sympathies with the inhabitants. In India we,
like the Romans, raise troops from the conquered peoples, but, unlike
them, we retain those troops for service in their own country. The
result of this attempt to modify the scheme was the Indian mutiny.

The plan of a local colonial army was, however, first tried in the West
Indies. At the close of the last century, when the West India Islands,
or the Plantations, as they were then called, were of as much importance
to, and held the same position in, the British Empire as India does
now, there was in existence a West India Army, consisting of twelve
battalions of negro troops, raised exclusively for service in the West
Indies.

As India was gradually conquered, and the West India trade declined
(from the abolition of the slave trade and other causes), the West India
Colonies, by a regular process, fell from their former pre-eminent
position. Each step in the descent was marked by the disbandment of a
West India regiment, until, at the present day, two only rem