WANTS RIFLE-SHOOTING MADE NATIONAL SPORT.
Lord Roberts Believes Patriotism Should Cause It to Take Its Place With Golf and Cricket.
Lord Roberts has been pleading for the instruction of all able-bodied citizens of England in rifle-shooting. He says, in the London Express:
The rifle is our national weapon of to-day, but unhappily neither law nor custom enjoins that the manhood of our country should learn its use. Cricket and football are our national pastimes; why should we not make rifle-shooting another?
Rifle-shooting is a sport—a game attractive enough in itself; and every marksman should bear in mind that in learning how to shoot he is fitting himself as a member of a great empire to take up arms for the defense of his country. Rifle-shooting should be at once a national pastime and a patriotic duty.
The reasons for this suggestion are not few. “Bobs” proceeds to make the most of his case, for he goes on to say:
The American authorities, in the recently published rules for the “promotion of rifle practise,” gave it as their opinion that, “in estimating the military efficiency of a soldier, if we consider ten points as a standard of perfection, at least eight of these points are skill in rifle shooting,” and with that opinion I quite agree.
If, then, the scheme which I have been strenuously advocating for some time past is carried to a successful conclusion, we shall be a nation whose manhood will be for practical purposes all efficient soldiers—an efficiency, moreover, that can be obtained without the least interference with industrial or professional pursuits.
But for the whole scheme to be successful, it is desirable that boys, youths, and men should be given a certain amount of military training and instruction in the use of the rifle.
It is, I am aware, urged against my proposals that they are little short of conscription. I have frequently asserted before that I am altogether opposed to conscription as being totally inapplicable to an army the greater part of which must always be serving abroad.
Surely there is all the difference in the world between a nation, every man of which is obliged to serve in the ranks of the regular army and perform while in those ranks all the onerous duties of a regular soldier during times of peace and for small wars, as is the case on the Continent, and a nation which, while maintaining a regular army for foreign service, asks every man to undergo such a training as will fit him to take a useful part in a great national emergency when every true Briton would be, in point of fact, certain to volunteer, and only the shirkers, the unpatriotic, and the disloyal would be content to remain passive.
The people of this country should identify themselves with the army and take an intelligent interest in what the army has to do, and not regard it as something quite outside the national life; and this they would certainly do if military training became universal and rifle shooting a national pursuit.
We need not be afraid that such training and a generally acquired efficiency with the rifle would result in a spirit of militarism that would make us anxious for war. I believe, and would I could persuade haters of militarism to believe, that there is no surer guarantee of peace than to be prepared for war; and if every able-bodied man is prepared to play the part of the strong man armed, his own and his country’s goods will remain at peace.
Those who cry out for greater military efficiency and those who argue that less attention should be given to the things of war are seeking by opposite means the same result—the abolishment for all time of “that mad game the world so loves to play.”