ABSTRACT
On the eve of the South African War in September 1899, General Sir Redvers Buller expressed the hope that there would be some period when the military men and the diplomatic and political forces were brought into line. The provision of an adequate institutional framework for the co-ordination of military and political objectives was never easy to achieve. In part, this failure reflected an ambiguity in late-Victorian society about the role of an army. Militarism was a Continental disease of no relevance to an island race. If the safety of the realm could be secured at sea then the army could remain relatively insignificant. Since the maintenance of naval supremacy was expensive enough, the army would have to take second place. An official report in 1888 even doubted whether the navy was maintaining the two-power standard something which the Naval Defence Act, 1889, tried to remedy.
