CROWN AND SWORD
The Monro-Fawcett duel turned the Prince Consort's attention, as
representing the Crown, to duelling, the abolition of which must begin
with the army. Courts of Honour suggested as successful abroad. Why
distrusted by English opinion. Views of the Duke and others. Hence the
Court first occupied with army reforms to good results. Contrast
between military resources 1837-97. Special attention of Court to
military education. Old and new schools of officers compared. Duke of
Wellington as Commander contrasted with his latest successors. Growth
of rifle volunteers; special influences in military education, _e.g._
Edward Hamley. Military democracy. Why necessarily imperfect.
So plausible a case may theoretically be made out for the duel as a social
institution that it is not surprising the custom should have died hard in
a combatant nation like the English. The ordeal by arms furnishes a simple
if barbaric mode of settling personal differences without the scandal and
the weariness of law; in an age whose boast is freedom of speech not less
than of thought, whose bane is the degeneration of that chartered liberty
into the unlicensed malignity and curiosity of small-talk, there always
will be ill-conditioned persons whom only fear of the horsewhip, the
rapier, or the pistol, can teach to discipline their tongue; all these
things have been said in favour of the duel as a mode of social
discipline. In practice, however, it was never found that the fear of a
challenge ensured social discretion of tongue, or a higher standard of
personal courtesy. When these combats were not farcical, as the duel has
generally become in France, where it still survives, they proved the
instruments of the professional homicide, who, trained to artistic murder,
went about society, seeking a feud with those whom he or his patrons
desired to be put out of the way. Stung to the quick by the brutalities of
O'Connell, Sir Robert Peel, during the early forties demanded, as the
story runs, the satisfaction which was not then an anachronism. The great
Irishman replied that yielding to the expostulations of his wife, he must
forego the pleasure of the encounter for which he was 'spoiling.' A second
invitation was declined on the ground that the entreaties of his offspring
had subdued the spirit of the warrior. Hence the point in Theodore Hook's
epigram published in the _John Bull_ of the period:--
Some men in their horror of slaughter,
Improve on the scriptural command;
They honour their wife and their daughter,
That their days may be long in the land.
The same statesman is known at a little later date to have been persuaded,
not without difficulty, to abstain from sending a friend to his chief
opponent[65] at the time of the latter's onslaughts on the Conservative
concession of Free Trade. Since then, Wimbledon Common or Wormwood Scrubbs
has probably never for a moment seriously suggested itself to any
honourable gentleman as a possible place to which to adjourn a
controversy with a parliamentary opponent.
A duel was the incident which caused the first intervention of the Prince
Consort in the social arrangements of English life. On the 1st of July
1843, Colonel Fawcett had been shot by his brother-in-law, Lieutenant
Monro. The latter had accepted the challenge most reluctantly; he had been
the grossly aggrieved party.[66] Under the then existing code, the
survivor's sole alternative to the certainty of being stigmatised as a
coward had been to accept the risk of being hung for a felon. Eight years
before the Queen's accession, in 1829, however, the great Duke of
Wellington had faced Lord Winchilsea's pistol; the memories of the (1809)
Canning-Castlereagh and other encounters did not then seem part of ancient
history. The Prince Consort, with the military instincts of his race
decided that the reform which he was bent on establishing must begin with
the army. The authority of the Duke of Wellington was at this moment
paramount equally in social, political, and military life. The great
general was known himself seriously to have considered the subject. With
him therefore, the Prince arranged an interview. Courts of Honour were
suggested by the Prince as rational substitutes for the appeal to the
sword. The Tribunals des Marechaux were said to have done good work in
France; Courts of Honour had been followed with the best results in the
Bavarian army. The Duke's objection to the proposal was the English
distrust of a secret tribunal; the authorities of the navy took the same
view as the Commander-in-Chief. Sir George Murray, then Master of the
Ordnance, a serious and accomplished man of the world, bluntly remarked
that quarrels would not be made up, or differences composed by the
arbitration of others; that the law as it already existed could do all
which was practicable to repress the practice. The Prince persevered with
his purpose. His suggestion was laid by the Secretary of State for War
before his colleagues in the Cabinet. Though the scheme was not adopted in
the form suggested by the Prince, his action in the matter led to an
amendment in the Articles of War (April 1844). Henceforward it was
declared to be suitable to the character of honourable men to apologize
and offer redress for wrong or insult committed, and equally suitable for
the aggrieved party frankly and cordially to accept the amende. Thus on
the initiative of the Queen's husband, there began the organization of
public opinion on the lines that have long since made the ordeal by arms
as practically obsolete in England as the ordeal by touch.
The Queen's devotion to her army has always been that of a mother for her
children; the Queen's gratitude evinced upon all possible occasions to her
soldiers for what they have done in the field has ever resembled that of a
woman to the protector of the weak against the strong. It was natural
therefore that, amid his civilian duties, the new representative of the
Throne, himself nurtured in a land that from being the Mark of Brandenburg
was growing into a great military monarchy, should actively show his
interest in the whole field of military reform. Later, when the post
became vacant, the Prince Consort, after consulting with the Ministers of
the day, declined more than once the Commandership-in-Chief. His
suggestions for army reform, and for national defence during the period of
the Crimean War, of the Indian Mutiny, and again during the
Franco-Austrian wars were made with a sense of responsibility which the
tenure of office could not have deepened as well as with a shrewd
perception of the needs and possibilities of the time that no statesman of
English birth could surpass. He had already been among the first to
recognize the brilliant merits of the Duke of Wellington's plan for the
defence of London, during the Chartist disturbances of 1848. To the
Prince's discrimination it is largely due that this domestic exploit of
the hero of Waterloo, not less memorable in its way than Waterloo
itself,[67] came properly to be appreciated by the country. To this day
the mighty fortresses which protect the shores of the Solent and
Southampton Water, and which make that part of the previously too
vulnerable South coast practically safe are to a great extent the
memorials of the wisdom and exertion of the Prince Consort. He had
already, while our soldiers were before Sebastopol, urged upon the
Government of the day the establishment of militia depots in place of the
regulars should they be withdrawn by an emergency, at Malta and
elsewhere, along the line of our Mediterranean possessions. When
therefore, the national alarm caused by the words and actions of our
French ally found its expression in Lord Palmerston's scheme of coast
defences, the memorandum on which these measures were based had been drawn
up by the Prince Consort at the wish of the Cabinet, and practically
formed the basis of the action of Ministers.
Nor of all the army reformers who have lived and worked since the Prince's
day, is there one who has failed to testify his indebtedness to the
suggestions of the husband of the Queen. In his many talks on this subject
with the military advisers of the Government of the day, the Prince often
anticipated those improvements in the administration of the land forces of
the Crown which since his time have been carried out. As the Prince
Consort correctly inferred from the character of the English people as
well as from the pace of official movements in England, must be the case,
the progressive changes in the English army have been effected piecemeal
by slow or minute instalments. The method pursued here has differed not
less from that followed in the reorganization of Continental armies than
the composition of the army of England differs from that of the great
fighting machines of the rest of Europe. In Prussia, after the defeat of
Jena (1806); in Austria after France had triumphed for Italy on the field
of Solferino (1859) the organic reconstruction of armies was possible.
Nothing of the same sort has taken place in England. Nothing, as the
Prince Consort perceived, of this kind could be effected here, unless
under the conscription. That system the Queen's husband once observed was
not likely to be established in England without a revolution.
The changes which the Prince suggested in able memoranda to successive
Ministers, which indeed he partly foresaw as coming, may in their general
results briefly be glanced at now. The mere enumeration of the military
resources of the country on the Queen's accession and on the eve of the
sixtieth anniversary of that event needs few words to deepen the contrast.
In 1837 the total military strength (regular army) of the country was
101,000. Sixty years later these figures were 147,105.[68] In 1837 India
was garrisoned by the Company's army of 26,500. In 1897 the Indian
military strength was 74,299 British, 129,963 Native. The increase has
been therefore, nearly threefold. In 1837 the Irish troops were 20,000. In
1897 these were between 26,000 and 27,000. As against the 26,000 troops in
the Channel Islands and Great Britain in 1837, there were in 1897, 81,516.
The entire strength of the horsed-field artillery in the accession year
was 72 guns--all at home. On New Year's Day 1897 the artillery total of
all kinds at home and abroad was 219 batteries or companies. In 1837 the
Horse Artillery batteries were armed with 12-pounder howitzers, and
6-pounder guns; the Field batteries had 9-pounder guns, 24-pounder
howitzers. The infantry still used the old flint 'Brown Bess,' which in
the cant phrase of the time was warranted at 200 yards to miss a haystack.
The Rifle regiments used the Brunswick rifle which at 400 yards, according
to Lord Wolseley, could not implicitly be trusted. To-day, the equipping
of our troops with the latest weapons of precision which contemporary
science designs is of itself a great department of English artificership.
Jealousy of the army is as much a bequest from Puritan times to the House
of Commons, as jealousy of the Church. Under the two first Georges, bitter
and tedious debates on the maintenance of the Hanoverian soldiers were of
constant recurrence. As a consequence, the standing troops which in the
Napoleonic wars had been 220,000 men were gradually reduced till in three
years after the peace (1818), they were only 80,000 strong.
Not without much pressure had Parliament during the earliest infancy of
the Colonies provided a handful of soldiers for the protection of settlers
in the lands beyond the sea as well as for the maintenance of civil order
at home. It was the paucity of the numbers available for his orders which
rendered the Duke of Wellington's scheme of London defence against
Chartist attack so memorable a piece of strategy. Even the influence and
popularity of this great soldier only secured the existence of a small
army at home on condition that it did not flaunt itself ostentatiously
before the civilian population. To keep up any fighting strength at all
the non-combatant portion of the army was reduced to an ineffective
minimum. Without exception, regiments were weak in men and horses. The
four chief company depots at home consisted of veterans waiting their
discharge, of invalids, and of ineffective, or imperfectly effective,
recruits.
Sometimes, as during the Canadian and Jamaica troubles in the earlier
years of the reign, additional troops were required for the Colonies.
These were composed of volunteers from other regiments and of casual
recruits. The _personnel_ of our army may be inferred from the Duke of
Wellington's oft-quoted remark that the man who enlisted was the worst and
most drunken inhabitant of the village. This was the scum of the earth
which under officers trained on the playing fields of Eton, the Duke had
led to victory in his Peninsular campaigns and in the Low Countries
against the consummate veterans of the French army. To win the affection
of his men; to make them feel that their commander was also their friend,
and of the same flesh and blood as themselves never occurred to the great
Duke. His latter-day successor, Lord Wolseley, on the Christmas day of
1896, visited the Wellington Barracks to taste the pudding and test the
comforts of the men. That was not the great Duke's way.
The moral and social improvement in the private soldier since the era of
humaner treatment began is shown by a progressive decrease in the number
of Courts Martial. In 1876 they were 12,187, in 1895, 8,211, a reduction
of about one-third. The treatment of soldiers by their superiors was
admirably adapted to demoralize them as men without improving them as
soldiers. When the recruit took the Queen's shilling, he ceased to be a
free citizen. He had said farewell to the world outside the barrack yard.
He became a nameless piece of martial machinery; sometimes he was
indulged; more often he was flogged. Nothing that could extinguish respect
for himself or his officers, was left undone. It had been the Duke of
Wellington's business to win victories not to conciliate men. The moral
and personal influence of such men as Lord Roberts and others which since
the Duke's day has been exercised for the moral and physical advantage of
the soldier is not an instrument that the hero of Waterloo often employed;
he did not believe in it. Nor was it a soldier, but a schoolmaster, Dr
Arnold of Rugby, who formulated the truth, that the best way of improving
character is to treat persons on the assumption of their becoming what you
wish them to be.
To pass to other details in the military contrast between the sixtieth and
the first years of the Queen's reign the short service system which has
proved admittedly so effective had occurred as a possibility only to a few
reformers of whom the Prince Consort was one, and Sir Charles Napier
another. In 1837 enlistment was for life or twenty-one years; the seven
years' term had been urged already by Napier. It was not however till 1847
that the reduction to ten years was sanctioned and then only by way of
special inducement for recruits when they were exceptionally few. Those
who can recall the scenes witnessed outside public houses in the country,
in the purlieus of Westminster or Trafalgar Square in London will not
consider the term 'crimping' too strong an expression to apply to the
process of forcing the Queen's shilling into the hands of half tipsy
yokels, and entirely intoxicated or desperate roughs. Nor is it surprising
that the Sergeant Kites of the period found all their arts of inventive
persuasion, all their largesses of drink necessary to induce the gallant
fellows whom they addressed to serve the Queen. Without the stimulating
allurement of drums and fifes playing, of banners flying, and unless the
future had been seen through a haze of beery or spirituous splendour, the
tale of recruits would have fallen lamentably short.
In the eyes of sober citizens of the industrial class, the life of the
soldier seemed only one degree less dismal and shameful than the career of
the hulks. As a fact the soldier's lot was perhaps half a century ago not
much more tolerable than that of the convict shipped for his offences
beyond seas. A prison with a chance of being killed in it represented in
the popular eye the existence of the private soldier. It involved
transportation with hard labour as a matter of course. One battalion first
raised in 1700 had been the whole of those 137 years abroad on active
service. When his destiny was less severe than this, a life insufferably
tedious was led by him in barracks pestilently unhealthy. To-day, upon a
different plane of comfort, and on a reduced scale of luxury, the private
soldiers may be said to enjoy the same recreations and opportunities of
improvement as his officer. He is the master of his own time during
several of the best hours in every day. He has no more difficulty in
obtaining leave up to midnight for a theatre visit than a Woolwich cadet
in getting a Sunday exeat from the Academy. Rooms for study and pastime
are provided within his barracks.
Domestic life is no longer incompatible with his military service. But in
1837 married quarters did not exist. Those who had wives and children
herded with their unmarried comrades in scandalous confusion. Whatever,
with a view of completely brutalizing if possible the men who fought their
country's battles, could in addition to these things be devised, was not
wanting. Punishments were meted out with indiscriminating severity. The
Queen had been on her throne some years before the lash was limited to
time of war. Among the officers brought up in the school of Wellington a
prejudice in favour of flogging as a simple, efficacious sort of British
punishment lingered perhaps till 1880, when on a memorable occasion after
an exciting debate that had signalized the opening of a new era of
parliamentary obstruction, the House of Commons decreed its entire
abolition. As has been already said, the policy to which the Duke of
Wellington had from political exigencies been as he thought compelled, was
to sacrifice to the maintenance of a small and often invisible body of
regulars every other branch of the Service.
Thus sixty years ago the Militia force of the country was declared by the
Adjutant-General of the day practically to be non-existent. Before 1815
this force had been a considerable body. After the Peace it dwindled down
to less than 70,000; when the Queen mounted her throne, it was seldom or
never regularly drilled. There had been no ballot for it since 1831.
Twenty-eight years later, December 1895, the strength of an annually
trained Militia was 107,742. The Militia, too, in 1837 was administered
not as it now is by the War Office, but by the Home Secretary in
conjunction with the Lords Lieutenant of Counties; its payment was
provided for in the civil not the military estimates; in 1837 its expense
was L192,115. The Yeomanry, then called Volunteers, comprised 18,000 men
of all ranks, at a cost in round numbers of L105,400. In 1897 the
Yeomanry, instructed not less systematically than the Militia, were a
force of 11,678 men.
Important additions to the permanent strength of the country against an
emergency were made, largely on the Prince Consort's initiative, during
the first decade of the reign. In 1842 the military pensioners already
enrolled and liable to service were regularly organized, less however as a
military power than as an aid to the civil Government, to the number of
7,000 men. This, too, was the period in which (1846) Sir John Burgoyne
submitted to Lord John Russell a State paper on that subject of coast
defences which had already engaged the Duke of Wellington and had been
taken up warmly as mentioned above by the Queen's husband. The Channel
Tunnel scheme was then unborn in the brains of future projectors. Our
military experts held England sufficiently to be weakened as it was by
the isthmus of steam which bridged the Straits of Dover. Sir John
Burgoyne's estimate in 1846 was that after providing for Ireland and for
home fortifications, only a maximum of 10,000 men could be placed in the
field; that the entire United Kingdom did not possess field guns enough
for 20,000 men; that there were no reserves of muskets or military stores;
that the dockyards were defenceless against any sudden attack. In 1847 the
apprehensions caused by these expert disclosures moved Lord Palmerston,
when Foreign Secretary in the Russell Cabinet, to suggest a loan for
military works along the Hampshire and Dorsetshire coast. Nothing,
however, was actually done until the Prince Consort in May 1859 secured
the issue of instructions to Lords Lieutenant of Counties by the War
Secretary. These resulted in the raising of the Volunteers. Lord
Palmerston was himself Prime Minister then. The attitude of Napoleon III.
towards England and the Austrian war scare of 1859 supplied the Government
with the leverage for the vote needed to strengthen the coast protection
of England in accordance with the Prince Consort's proposal of twelve
years earlier. On June 23, 1860, the earliest Volunteer Review was held in
Hyde Park. A week or so later, on July 2, the Volunteers first met on
Wimbledon Common; the competition was opened by Her Majesty discharging
her rifle and scoring the inaugural bull's eye.
A quarter of a century later the Volunteers had risen from 119,000 in 1860
to 226,752 in 1886, of whom 220,000 were efficients. At the number then
reached subject to fluctuations of some thousands periodically they seem
disposed to remain. In Great Britain 800,000 men of military age have
passed through the Volunteers. Thus, not counting our natural rampart of
sea, and a navy which public opinion, if not official patriotism, insists
on maintaining at a high point, the coast fortresses bristling in nearly
continuous array from Dover to the Land's End mask behind them little less
than 1,000,000 citizen soldiers, who with some help from their brethren of
the Royal Artillery could effectively man our coast batteries.
Military education under teachers of the new school and the class of
officers thus produced are the immediate outcome of the interest taken in
the army by the Court at, and subsequently to, the time of the Prince
Consort. The whole scheme of education under which the commanders of the
future are trained and a general anxiety for the most beneficent use of
the Queen's prerogative, were much in the thoughts of the Queen's husband.
The council of military education was largely the work of the Prince, as
also was the formation of the Aldershot camp. When a 'governor' was to be
chosen for the Prince of Wales, the selection made was the first Commander
at Aldershot and one of the chief members of the education council, Sir
William Knollys, who, on the Prince reaching his majority became chief of
his household. When that veteran was appointed Usher of the Black Rod he
was succeeded as Private Secretary to the Heir Apparent by one so
thoroughly trained to his administrative methods as his son, Sir Francis
Knollys;--a man in whom common sense attains as nearly as is conceivable
to the calibre of absolute genius. It was at the period now mentioned and
under these influences that officers in the scientific corps began to get
their proper share of army staff appointments and commands. So entirely
have the old disabilities of that corps disappeared that to-day, in
striking contrast to the earlier experience, an officer of Royal Artillery
or Royal Engineers who in general respects shows the necessary aptitude
enjoys the same chance as anyone else of staff employment in peace. When
he has reached the grade of General officer, he will not be at any
disadvantage in the process of selection for a command. Here merit alone
tells now. Whatever arm of the Service to which he belongs the best
candidate practically never fails to be chosen. Generally, in the opinion
of the best professional judges, the young officer finds the army a
self-supporting profession. The exact experience seems to be that a young
man obtaining a commission in the infantry of the Line or in the Artillery
can look forward at no distant date to marrying in fair comfort, and that
as a bachelor he requires no larger allowance or private means than he
would need in any other branch of the public employ, that, for example, of
the Colonial Service.
In cavalry regiments, or in the Household Brigade, life is more costly. In
these cases, the young officer could scarcely subsist in comfort without
private resources equal to those on which young men entering the
diplomatic service must at the outset of their career be able to count.
Obviously if the army is to be made a career sufficiently attractive for
young Englishmen of first-rate abilities as well as of gentle birth, the
prizes of the profession must not, for the sake of an unwise national
economy, be too severely diminished in value. The complaint is general and
just that the emoluments of those who win their way to the top are already
unattractively small and few. It cannot be a satisfactory state of things
under which no General officer can afford, without private fortune of his
own, to take a command. Impolitic retrenchment has touched other positions
than these. Thus, quite recently the salary of the Military Secretary to
the Commander-in-Chief has been cut down from L2,100 to L1,500; that of
Adjutant-General to the Forces from L2,700 to L2,100; that of Governor of
the Royal Military Academy from L2,000 to L1,500. The unwisdom of these
reductions and the comparative smallness of the highest army stipends,
become the more apparent when it is remembered that all military
appointments, unlike civil appointments from the Primacy of Canterbury
down to a junior Treasury lordship, are for five years only, that the
installation in these posts, and the establishment they require are
necessarily costly; thus the choice is practically limited to men of
means. Nor does a timocratic[69] scheme of military preferment accord well
with the democratic ideal of careers unrestrictedly open to all talents.
The reform in the system of officers' education which the Prince Consort
launched his eldest son has already lived to see practically
accomplished. At the beginning of the reign the average military officer
at his best was a keen sportsman or a well-bred London club-man; at his
worst, and as not very unfrequently witnessed, the original of him may be
recognised to-day in Thackeray's Sketches of Ensigns Rag and Famish;
before some Becky Sharpe of the period had taken them in charge, and had
developed them into Captains Rawdon Crawley, to become in due course
candidates for the Governorship of Coventry Island. The officer of to-day,
naval as well as military, is not less keen a sportsman, is as good a
shot, can take and hold a line of his own across country equally well. But
he is a soldier first, eager to add to his knowledge from the facts of
history, or from contemporary examples of professional achievement. There
are to-day no better read men than those who serve their Sovereign ashore
or afloat. The training of our sailors of whatever rank leaves perhaps
something to be wished for. Scientific seamanship, however, is not merely
an ideal, but a familiar experience. Jack Tars or flag officers,--the
school wherein respectively they are trained is, as Nelson himself was,
and wished to see his sailors, above all things scientific too.
The man-of-war's-man of to-day has educated himself so well from books,
with occasional hints from his commanding officer, as to be often a better
informed person than the average undergraduate or Admiralty clerk. To
speak now only of the soldier. It is not only that like the sailor he has
felt the intellectually quickening influences which are part of the
atmosphere of his epoch. The military officer of to-day has passed
through the curriculum which the Prince Consort was among the earliest to
mark out; he has already acquired nearly all that learning which thirty
years ago it was predicted would prove the ruin of the Service. Between
what he is and what he was, the contrast is not less great than between a
future Moltke and Corinthian Tom; yet has he not developed into the
spectacled professor with head too big for any busby to fit, to which some
looked forward should the British subaltern fail to model himself after
Albert Smith's medical student.
Almost till the beginning of the present decade there might be seen any
afternoon issuing from the Athenaeum Club in Pall Mall, a well-set-up
gentleman, scarcely middle-aged, soldierly indeed of figure, but chiefly
noticeable for his commandingly intellectual brow. This was Edward Hamley.
Should the time now spoken of happen to have been that of the opening of
the Franco-Prussian War, Hamley was perhaps demonstrating to a civilian
friend the justification of his prediction of a French triumph afforded by
the slight advantage gained by French troops at the early affair of
Saarbruck; then came the French reverses. Hamley was not cast down. These
were tactical moves, only the preludes of decisive triumph; so things went
on till the day of Sedan arrived, when even General Hamley was constrained
to acknowledge a French failure. If, however, like most of his cloth, this
able and upright soldier was sometimes opinionated, he had earned almost a
right to be so by having done more than any other man of his generation
for the intellectual formation of the new order of English officer who
stands in such marked contrast to his predecessor. That young Aldershot,
Woolwich, or Sandhurst does not find time hang heavily on his hands when
there is no cricket match on, no race-meeting whither to drive his
dogcart, no afternoon train to town to catch, is chiefly due to the
intellectual habits which Hamley did more by example and writing than
anyone else to generate. The most competent critics, by no mean personal
partizans of the author, have testified the impossibility of
over-estimating the good done by his book on the _Operations of War_. This
was the first readable work in the English language on strategy and
tactics; in the opinion of experts it is far ahead of any book on those
subjects previously written in any language. Hamley took the art of war
out of the dull and dreary region of technical diagram, of skeleton charts
of battle; he dealt with it as a living theme. Thus Hamley's great
treatise, even to those who have been students of Jomini, Clausewitz, and
M'Dougall, is a revelation. Its author, not by innate genius alone, but by
years of careful practice, had acquired an excellent literary style; the
clear and forcible language of this book first taught professional readers
how to study all military history, and how to apply the lessons of the
past to the campaigns of the future. Such a volume then may, if any, claim
to belong to what De Quincey called the literature of power as distinct
from that of mere information.
Intellectual quality is not the only respect in which there has been
lately witnessed a change among the officers of the army. The Crimean War
was followed by many promotions to the grade of officers from the ranks.
Since then the average number of commissions given in this way seems to
have been about twenty-five a year. Of this number 16 have gone to
infantry, 4 to cavalry, and the remainder to other branches of the
Service. These promotions, suitable as they are to the day of democracy,
cannot of course affect sensibly the tone or the _personnel_ of the
officers of the Queen's army, who will continue to be, as they have been,
men born to the social advantages of gentle station. The social fusion and
personal intimacy of men whose antecedents and interests differ, though
their official rank be identical, is not likely ever to be more complete
than between English and native officers in the Indian Staff Corps
regiments; though the difficulty in the way of amalgamation proceeds
probably less from the exclusiveness of the older officer than from the
indisposition of the new to avail himself of the social opportunities
placed technically at his disposal.[70]