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THERE are now lying before us the copies of two Acts of Parliament which Mr Cardwell has persuaded the Lords and Commons to pass in the course of the current session. They are both intended to give to the country an improved system of military administration. One, called the War Office Act, aims at establishing an effective scheme of control and finance at headquarters. The other, the Army Enlist ment Act, deals, as its title implies, with the enrolment of the troops themselves. We do not propose on the present occasion to take any special notice of the former of these Acts, for several reasons. In the first place, it really settles nothing. All that it does is formally to empower the Secretary of State for War to do that which he had a perfect right to do without the authorisation of the Legislature that which, in point of fact, he had done before he took counsel with the Legislature at all. He had already established-or rather accepted as established, for he took it over from his predecessor, as he had done from General Peel-a department of control in the War VOL. CVIII.-NO. DCLVII.

Office, having at its head an officer of acknowledged ability, whom he proposed to call the Clerk of the Ordnance. He had further invited to assist him, and placed in a room in Pall Mall, a junior Lord of the Treasury, whose duties appear to be as yet very imperfectly defined, but whom he called his Financial Secretary. All that Parliament did was to say that "it shall be lawful for the Secretary of State" to perform these operations, and to change the title of the chief of the control department from Clerk of the Ordnance to Surveyor-General. To go into the merits of a piece of legislation so entirely superfluous as this would be, as it seems to us, a grievous waste of time. Again, the machinery which the War Office Act is supposed to create is a great deal too complicated, a great deal too full of defects, and too obviously capable of improvement, to warrant any attempt to analyse or dissect it, except at length. Now we cannot, on the present occasion, find room so to treat it, keeping in view the proper object which we have set to ourselves to attain. Obviously, before you invent or perfect

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