the moral is simple and inspiring—self-reliance, trust in our own experience, as confirmed by the subsequent experience of others. by all means let us borrow what is good from foreigners, and i should be the last to deny that, on topics unconnected with combat and weapons, there are many valuable hints to be obtained from general von bernhardi's writings, and those of other foreign cavalrymen. but let us not borrow what is bad, nor lose ourselves in the fog which smothers his cavalry principles, when our own road to reform is plain.

some measure of reform, if report is true, is to take shape in the next revision of the cavalry manual. i end, as i began, with expressing the hope that reform may be drastic. but reform cannot end with the cavalry manual. it is absolutely necessary to introduce clearness, consistency and harmony into the four manuals: "cavalry training" (with its absurd postscript[pg 215] for yeomanry), "mounted infantry training," "infantry training," and "combined training." at present the contradictions between these official manuals is a public scandal. but i suggest that the task of reconstruction is absolutely impossible unless the basis taken be that fire, by whomsoever employed, is absolute arbiter of tactics, and that the cavalryman is for practical purposes a compound of three factors—man, horse, and rifle.

the lance should go altogether. whether the sword is retained, as the american cavalry retain it, rather as a symbol than as a factor in tactics, or is dispensed with altogether, as our divisional mounted troops and our colonial mounted riflemen dispense with it, is a matter of very small moment, provided that the correct principle be established and worked out in practice. it was because i doubted the possibility of establishing the correct principle in this country without abolition that in my previous book i advocated abolition, on the precedent of the south african war. the adoption of a bayonet or a sword-bayonet is, in my own humble opinion, an interesting open question.