What Is Retrenchment?

What is the exact meaning of the word Retrenchment?

According to Wikipedia,

Retrenchment (French: retrenchment, an old form of retranchement, from retrancher, to cut down, cut short) is an act of cutting down or reduction, particularly of public expenditure.

Cutting Down or Reduction.... hmmmm...I wonder if this is how our boss understand the word...

Political usage

The word is familiar in this, its most general sense, from the motto of the Gladstonian Liberal party in British politics, "Peace, Retrenchment and Reform."

The manifesto for 1906 Liberal landslide was launched with this slogan:

Expenditure calls for taxes, and taxes are the plaything of the tariff reformer. Militarism, extravagance, protection are weeds which grow in the same field, and if you want to clear the field for honest cultivation you must root them all out. For my own part, I do not believe that we should have been confronted by the spectre of protection if it had not been for the South African war. ... Depend upon it that in fighting for our open ports and for the cheap food and material upon which the welfare of the people and the prosperity of our commerce depend we are fighting against those powers, privileges, injustices, and monopolies which are unalterably opposed to the triumph of democratic principles.^[1]

[edit]Military usage

A special technical use of the term is in fortification, where it is applied to a work or series of works constructed in rear of existing defences in order to bar the further progress of the enemy should he succeed in breaching or storming these. An example was in the siege of Port Arthur in 1904.