Taking twenty-five as the average number of pupils that could be, with full advantage, under daily practice, and four days as the period for completing their instruction, one hundred and fifty might be thus finished in the twenty-four (as an average) working days of each month, a battalion of about six hundred men in four months, and consequently twelve hundred men in the eight temperate months (from, about the 1st of March to the 1st of November) in each year.
To complete, therefore, the British army on home service in one year, there would be required about forty such establishments scattered throughout the United Kingdom, and for the volunteer rifle corps and militia about fifty more. After the year of theoretical instruction, they would remain as most useful for freer practice.
The expense would be, the cost of the land, which (considering that strips of worthless soil, or of government ground, might in many instances be procured gratis) should not exceed five hundred pounds the station; and light fencing, the butt, targets, sheds, ball-proof sentry-boxes, rests, and a small house for the marker in charge of the ground, which might average four hundred pounds more. In all nine hundred pounds for each establishment as a permanent outlay, or about thirty-six thousand pounds for the regular army, and forty-five thousand pounds for the volunteer rifle corps and militia.
The markers might be military pensioners, with a small addition to their pay, and the instructors retired officers or non-commissioned officers, with a similar allowance. Many from these classes would be well calculated for such duties, and would enter with spirit into them.
To give complete success to an appeal to the nation for the expenditure thus required, notorious facts, added to a widely-acknowledged principle, mentioned in the first edition of this treatise, should be sufficient: “Every reasonable outlay towards the maintenance of national military efficiency is true economy; and the neglect of it, real extravagance.”—(“Essentials,” Art. 2nd, Correct Firing.)
The notorious facts referred to are, that the marvellous inventive spirit of the age has, at one bound, made military efficiency dependent, in a super-eminent degree, on skill in rifle practice, and that other nations, sensitively alive to the circumstance, are devoting to it immense methodical attention.[[18]]
SHORT OBSERVATIONS UPON DRESS AND APPOINTMENTS.
It is so distinctly evident that the immense advance which is at the present period in operation upon military weapons and practice must extend its influence to dress and appointments, that a treatise of this kind would not now be complete in its parts without a reference to them.
Dress will be affected pre-eminently, in a manner which has not, as yet, attracted much, if any, public attention. It will be indescribably more than ever important to distinguish the troops of one nation from those of other nations, by uniforms that can be known afar off.
Among the most perplexing, hindering, and revolting incidents of a campaign, are those of mistaking foes for friends and friends for foes. Facts are the best arguments; and a few of those which occurred under the author’s own observation, in a corps probably as little liable to make mistakes as any that ever stood on a battle-field, are offered in enforcement of this consideration.