XII HOUSE OF GORDON.
As it happens, the Gordons are peculiarly susceptible of co-ordination
in the terms of a dominating kind of achievement. Tradition made up
its mind long ago, and tradition was right, that the shining ability of
the family came out in the art of war. They were originally the product
of war, of endless feuds on the Borders, almost as vague as L'Aiglon's
imaginary field of Wagram, from which they emerged as a well-defined
group of formidable fighters, ultimately rewarded for their pains with
a big grant of land in the North. Once established there, they had to
continue, as they had begun, to increase by war their footing at the
expense of existing families. As the idea of the State developed, they
sought to keep their own identity as Cocks of the North, by maintaining
their own beliefs against all comers, notably against the Covenanters,
and more tentatively in favour of the House of Stuart. When resistance
proved ineffectual, as it was bound to do, even with the Gordons, contra
mundum, they fell in with the new order in the terms of this great impulse,
raising troops galore, and crowding the services with officers iJy the
hundred, and private men who are countless. Nor did their energy end
there. When England was still a closed door, the} flocked to the flag
of every Continental Power which would have them : and, true to type,
they figured conspicuously in the fight of the South against the North
in the great Civil War of America. Soldiering has become a much more
humdrum affair to-day ; and yet it is onl}' five years since a young
Seaforth Highlander Volunteer from Elgin, George Gordon, set out with
a small band of filibusters to capture a province in Brazil !
Tradition apart, the proposal to evaluate the achievement of the
Gordons in the terms of fighting was no Casaubon counsel : on the
contrary, it fitted naturally into our modern interest in War, which is
the paradoxical twin of the growing claims of Peace, and finds expres-
sion in the imposing structure of naval and military history, most
laboriously and variously pieced together during the last quarter of a
century. That one must think of war in connection with family and
territorial history is onlj' the logical result of the origins of our army,
which, after many experiments, has become more territorial than ever,
defence having now been made an integral part of local government.
The call on the great landlords under the Territorial Forces Act of 1907,
far from being a piece of new-fangled Radicalism, was really a reversion
to the fundamental ideals involved in the feudal origins of our army,