One of the very earliest instances of ce-operative action between different potentates for belligerent purposes is that recorded in the XIV chapter of the Book of Genesis, where four kings' took it into their heads to go on a marauding expedi against five others inhabiting a fertile country which had excited the envy of their assailants. The expedition met with complete success for the time being, but was much upset by the energetic behaviour of Abraham, [whose entire army is said to have consisted of 318 retainers of proved fidelity, who fell on the enemy unawares and brought back the entire outfit of loot, This striking example of the superiority of individual initiative as against the dilatoriness of combined forces remains after an uncertain number of centuries as a warning and an encouragement to all generations. It is not necessary to fall back upon the voluminous records of the Crimean War to remind ourselves of the embarrassments into which we fell at that time from undertaking to cooperate with the French. Nothing seemed to go right—everything appeared to go wrong, and it is not unlikely that each party to the unequal contract wished himself well out of it; and especially now that we have been officially informed that on that occasion we bet on the wrong horse' we can feel very little complacency in the retrospect of those dreary years. A little later when we came to the point of a definite settle-men with China for all the accumulated grievances of a half century and more of evasion, deceit, and 1 colossal arrogance only matched by their vast and varied ignorance,' we again found ourselves shoulder to shoulder with our hereditary foes, once more aiming at the same ends as ourselves. Every detailed contemporary account of the tiresome operations of 1860 fairly bristles with complaints of the inconveniences and difficulties into which this unwise al-hance forced us. The Gauls were never ready, and when they moved they generally lacked most of what a well appointed army even at that remote date ought to have had. It was only by the reiterated threat of pushing on without them that their Admiral and the General could be brought forward at a time when our own not too impetuous advance had been decided on. The disagreements were such as almost always occur when contingents of such different capacities and antecedents undertake to work together under difficult and complex conditions. These are to be expected, and generally speaking have always been found to be inevitable. But there was another more serious matter. For reasons which shall not undertake to mention, the French troops were under much less control than ours, and on the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.