such as General du Barail and General Billot, both Ministers for War, we may regard it as highly probable that it will be in this direction, of improving the quality of their ranks, that French military policy will tend in the future, especially now that an increase in quantity is debarred by a stagnation in the growth of the population.

The next great war will undoubtedly bring many surprises in its train. The advance in weapons of destruction, especially in the power of artillery and repeating rifles, will not, perhaps, produce more marked results than will the great masses of short-service soldiers which the extreme development of the system permits great continental powers to place in the field. Whether the results of the training of these men will be at all in proportion to their numbers; above all, whether they will have among them a sufficient number of experienced soldiers by profession-men of military experience, knowledge, and resource to leaven the numbers of swiftly trained, machine-made reservists, remains to be seen; but I venture to predict that the army which, while not greatly numerically inferior, has devoted its attention to quality rather than to quantity, to providing trained and experienced soldiers rather than hordes of men who are as much armed civilians as soldiers, will be at a decided advantage in the next great struggle.

Providence is on the side of big battalions-but of big battalions of soldiers, not of men whose experience of the active ranks of their profession has not extended on an average over one or two years of

their life.

Here lies the last great hope of France. In point of numbers she cannot hope any longer to keep her place in the race, to compete with her powerful rival, nor apparently to enter into competition with her own past. Her stationary, almost diminishing, population renders this impossible now and for some time to come; for it must be remembered that it is to the children born to-day that she must look for her army of a quarter of a century hence, and the coming generation of French soldiers will be strong or weak according as the birth-rates of the present time are large or small.

The nation is alive to the deplorable circumstances disclosed by statistics of population, census returns, and figures of births and deaths. Whether any means can be taken to improve these circumstances and restore France to her former vigorous national growth is very doubtful; but it is not numbers alone that win battles, as a thousand instances in history-not the least significant of which are to be found in our own island story-go to prove. present there is little doubt, judging by the utterances of French military authorities from the highest downwards, that France is

At

inferior to her great rival not only in numbers, but in organisation. The race is not always to the swift, or the battle to the strong, but it would be madness therefore to assume that the slow will first arrive at the desired goal, or the weak emerge victors from the struggle; and at present everything conspires to point to a decided failure of France in the great national competition in which all Europe is engaged.

JOHN ADYE,

Major R.A. and Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE

SIAMESE VISIT

OLD chroniclers tell us that as far back as the Georgian epoch a mission from the King of Siam, in the East Indies,' was 'received' at the Court of St. James's. However this may have been, the present ruler of Siam had never journeyed westward of Calcutta-albeit his own city of Bangkok is the most considerable place encountered by the voyageur between the capital of British India and Cantonuntil this year, when something besides a natural desire to see the world has brought him to Europe. That England was from the first the objective point of King Chulalongkorn's tour was immediately known at the Quai d'Orsay, where, indeed, it has been the cause of much speculation and more than a little uneasiness. In the present paper I propose to show how extremely well founded this feeling of unrest both is and ought to be. It must be borne in mind that practically from first to last the aim of the King of Siam's visit to Great Britain has almost a purely political

significance.

What are the facts? The beginnings of French earth-hunger in Indo-China date back to 1774. In that year the Annamite people, then under the suzerainty of the Chinese Emperor, had the ill-grace to put to death the petty ruler of their country, together with his eldest son. His second son sought sanctuary with the Bishop of Adran, a Franciscan missionary, through whose influence at the Court of Louis the Sixteenth the throne of Annam was regained with the co-operation of a few French officers. Between this date and the thirty years' peace' Gallic missionary influences were steadily at work in Annam; but it was not until exactly fifty years ago (1847) that a persecution of the Christians by King Thien-Tri afforded all the excuse deemed necessary for an open act of aggression. In that year the French destroyed Thien-Tri's 'fleet'; nine years later they seized the citadel of Turon and acquired Cambodia; and in February 1861, France and England being then allied against China, Admiral Charner secured possession of Saigon-never again to be evacuated by his countrymen.

In 1868 the present King of Siam, Phra Somdetch Chulalongkorn, ascended the throne. Almost at once it was forced upon him that his French neighbours were casting covetous eyes upon his dominions. Could he hope to resist them successfully? He did not know, but desired to try. In the early eighties France commenced the subjugation of Tonquin. Although, it will be recollected, no actual declaration of war with China took place, hostilities on a formidable scale were undertaken by the French. Formosa was bombarded, and-this by a ruse very similar to that subsequently employed by them when forcing the bar of the river at Bangkok— the French also destroyed the Chinese fleet at Foo-chow. General Brière de l'Isle was given supreme command of 'the Army of Tonquin,' with General Négrier as second. In 1885 the latter (who appears to have resembled Hannibal's description of Marcellusa brave soldier but a bad general') was driven back from Langson with heavy loss, and had the mortification of seeing his wounded have their hands cut off by the barbarous Tonquinese. This disaster was disguised as much as possible at the time, the French authorities having forbidden the presence of foreign correspondents in their camps; but the affair was described fully to the writer by their Consul at Bangkok.

A campaign of negative triumphs' left the French in touch with a half-conquered people. Coupled with the death, from sickness or wounds, of Admiral Courbet and many another capable officer of both services, it created something like a revulsion of feeling at home. On the voting of the Tonquin credits stormy debates were the order of the day, and M. Clémenceau was keenest of the keen in opposing the prolongation of the struggle, just as Jules Ferry led the movement in its favour.

It was not until 1893 that France openly attacked Siam. The demand was subtly formulated-on behalf, not of the Government of the French Republic, but of the Empire of Annam.' But even so the French had been in Annam for perhaps a quarter of a century, whereas Siam could show an undisturbed, undisputed tenure of the Mekong River's rive gauche for at least ninety years. To slightly paraphrase a familiar passage in Henry the Fourth, by her sword she had won it, and by her sword she desired to keep it.

It would be interesting to learn from the King's own lips the effect of this just and moderate' claim upon the Court of Siam. It burst upon them like a thunderclap. The Foreign Minister, Prince Devawongse,' and his colleagues suggested a little substantial proof of this shadowy claim; and to this day such proof has never been vouchsafed them. The cession to France of territory amounting to rather more than one-third of the entire kingdom was insisted upon;

'The King's half-brother and brother-in-law.

and in March 1893 that Power sent the ship-of-war Lutin to Bangkok, where she remained for months a standing menace.

A rigorous blockade of the Siamese seaboard followed, resulting in a few short days in complete surrender of the disputed territory to France and the payment of a heavy war indemnity. The De Lanessan school of diplomacy had scored a shining success.

And the attitude of affairs at the present time? By the AngloFrench Convention of last year the King of Siam's position became, to say the least, slightly anomalous. That agreement practically amounted to the fair division, between France and England, of the whole of Siam save that portion situate in the fertile valley of the Meinam, whose autonomy they still guarantee to preserve. And yet is the arrangement fair' in the fullest sense of that commercial term? Anyhow, France holds, in addition to the long-coveted port of Chantabûn, that part of the province of Luang Phrabang which is situate upon the right bank of the Mekong. Moreover, under the Convention between France and China in 1895, the former Power was given every facility for completing her control of the great trade route into Yunnan. Enough has been written by others on the subject of a neutral zone to convince Imperialists of the vital importance to Great Britain of Siam as a buffer between Burma and French Indo-China. Mr. George Curzon, in most of whose conclusions one is forced to concur, has very aptly described British India as 'between two fires'-Russia and France. But was Mr. Curzon exact in committing himself to the assertion that the commercial position of Great Britain in the Far East stands unassailed and unassailable'? 2 France, by winning for herself what may be vulgarly described as 'the best of the deal,' has proved alike her ability and her anxiety to strike a decisive blow at British commercial supremacy in this direction. Absolutely devoid of the colonising instinct as they are, these Chauvinists cannot be made to recognise that whatever country has the misfortune to come under their ægis is henceforth doomed to commercial extinction. Of this truth all history is pregnant.

The King of Siam, as he glances towards England, must feel that the hand of ill-fate has pressed heavily upon his country of late years. In addition to the blows dealt by the wiles of French statecraft, the death of the Crown Prince, Maha Vajirunhis, a bright, promising, and talented boy, was a misfortune as staggering as it was wholly unexpected. The King himself is in a delicate state of health, and the outlook cannot be such as to inspire him with a renewal of high hope while his 'friends the enemy' are knocking so impatiently at the gates of Bangkok. From the walled and battlemented city. within a city, in which His Majesty passes the greater part of his time when at home, he cannot possibly see many gleams of hope upon the cloudy political horizon. Former treaties and conventions between

2 The Destinies of the Far East.