'The ignorance of their duty of the officers of the army
who are every day arriving in this country, and the general
inattention and disobedience to orders by many of those who
have been long here, increase the details of the duty to
such an extent as to render it almost impracticable to
carry it on; and owing to this disobedience and neglect, I
can depend upon nothing, however well regulated and
ordered.'--_Letter to Lieut.-General Hill, Oct. 13, 1811._
At Freneda, on the 19th of February, 1813, he issued the following
general order:--
'The commander of the forces is concerned to be obliged to
notice such repeated disobedience to orders _on every
subject_. It might have been expected that in a case in
which the convenience of the officers themselves was the
object of the orders issued, they would have been obeyed;
but the general officers and commanding officers of
regiments may depend upon it that until they enforce
obedience to every order, and see that the officers under
them understand and recollect what is ordered, those
subjects of complaint must exist.'
The following letter shows what the Duke meant when he said that he
had an army that would 'go anywhere and do anything.' In the rank and
file he had splendid material, but here is his description of the kind
of officers which the purchase system gave him:--
'I have received your letter of the 5th, and I am sorry
that I cannot recommend ---- for promotion, because I have
had him in arrest since the battle for disobeying an order
given to him by me verbally. The fact is, that if
discipline means habits of obedience to orders, as well as
military instruction, we have but little of it in the army.
Nobody ever thinks of obeying an order; and all the
regulations of the Horse Guards, as well as of the War
Office, and all the orders of the army applicable to this
peculiar service, are so much waste paper. It is, however,
an unrivalled army for fighting, if the soldiers can only
be kept in their ranks during the battle; but it wants some
of those qualities which are indispensable to enable a
general to bring them into the field in the order in which
an army ought to be to meet an enemy, or to take all the
advantage to be derived from a victory; and the cause of
these defects is the want of habits of obedience and
attention to orders by the inferior officers; and indeed, I
might add, by all. They never attend to an order with an
intention to obey it, or sufficiently to understand it, be
it ever so clear, and therefore never obey it when
obedience becomes troublesome, or difficult, or
important.'--_Letter to Colonel Torrens, dated July 18,
1813._
Two more extracts from the Duke of Wellington's correspondence must
suffice for this part of our survey:--
'I really believe that, with the exception of my old
Spanish infantry, I have got not only the worst troops, but
the worst equipped army, with the worst staff, that was
ever brought together.'--_Letter to Earl Bathurst, dated
June 25, 1815._
In the same letter he goes on to complain of an officer who 'knows no
more of his business than a child, and I am obliged to do it for him;
and, after all, I cannot get him to do what I order him.'
For the following extract we are indebted to an able pamphlet entitled
'The Purchase System,' by the author of 'The Second Armada:'--
'Our officer is a gentleman.... Indeed, we carry this
principle of the gentleman, and the objection of
intercourse with those under his command, so far, as that,
in my opinion, the duty of a subaltern officer, as done in
a foreign army, is not done at all in the cavalry or the
British infantry of the line. It is done in the Guards by
the sergeants. Then our gentleman-officer, however
admirable his conduct in the field, however honourable to
himself, however glorious and advantageous to his country,
is but a poor creature in disciplining his company, in
camp, quarters or cantonments.'--_Letter of Duke of
Wellington, dated April 22, 1829._
Our inquiry has now led us to this result. The purchase system and the
abuse of over-regulation prices have been found to be so bound up
together that all efforts to destroy the one while retaining the other
have always ended in the most signal failure; and the demoralizing
influence of the whole system was such that the officers of the
British army were in the habit of 'shamefully forfeiting their honour
as officers and gentlemen,' and were utterly incompetent, the Duke of
Wellington being witness, to fill the most ordinary duties of their
profession. In none of the extracts, however, which we have quoted
from the Duke of Wellington's published despatches does he directly
attribute the evils of which he complains to the purchase system, with
its inseparable concomitant, the payment of over-regulation prices.
His mind was too much occupied with the daily labour of correcting the
faults of his officers to find time to analyze the causes of which
those faults were the natural offspring. Here and there, however, we
find indications that the inefficiency of his officers and the system
of purchase were in his mind intimately connected. This, at all
events, is the sense in which we read the following extract from a
letter to the Commissary-in-Chief, dated November 6, 1810:--
'I may be wrong, but I have objections to all those rules
which prevent the promotion of officers of merit. It is the
abuse of the unlimited power of promotion which ought to be
prevented; but the power itself ought not to be taken, by
regulation, from the Crown, or from those who do the
business of the Crown. By these regulations we are
undermining as fast as possible the efficiency of the
Government. There is no power anywhere of rewarding
extraordinary services or extraordinary merit; and, under
circumstances which require unwearied attention in every
branch and department of our military system, we appear to
be framing regulations to prevent ourselves from
commanding it by the only stimulus--the honourable reward
of merit.'
It is plain that this criticism strikes at the very root and essence
of the purchase system; nor is it the only criticism of the kind that
the Duke of Wellington has left on record. In March, 1824, the
Commander-in-Chief, the Duke of York, submitted to the Duke of
Wellington, then Master of the Ordnance, three plans of military
reform which he had in contemplation. Those plans, unfortunately, are
not given, but we gather from the correspondence between the Duke and
Major-General Sir Herbert Taylor, that it was proposed, among other
things, 'to stop all regimental promotion by purchase, and on the
retirement of an officer the successor to be selected by the
Commander-in-Chief from the general mass.' It is impossible, without
having the whole correspondence before us, clearly to make out what
the Duke's views were on this point; but it is obvious that this part
of the scheme is in the fullest accord with the opinions expressed by
him in the passage last quoted; and we may therefore presume that, if
he could have seen his way to any fair and practicable plan for
abolishing purchase, he would have given it his support. But, however
that may be, one thing is beyond all doubt--the Duke of Wellington
condemned absolutely and peremptorily the payment of over-regulation
prices. Witness the following passage in his letter to Sir Herbert
Taylor, dated 'London, 17th March, 1824:'--
'I would forbid any brokers to interfere, and would declare
the determination of the Commander-in-Chief to recommend to
his Majesty to cancel the grant of any commission granted
in consequence of any negotiation with them. I would
likewise recommend to his Royal Highness to declare to the
army his determination to recommend to his Majesty to
cancel any commission granted for which it shall appear
that the officer appointed to it has paid more than the
regulated price, and to dismiss from his Majesty's service
any colonel or commanding officer of a regiment who may
appear to have forwarded or recommended such appointment,
knowing that more than the regulated price had been, or was
to be, paid for it.'
'I am afraid,' he adds despondingly, 'that much of what I above
proposed is difficult to carry into execution, and, as I have above
stated, it may be impossible to prevent the evil altogether.' In his
reply, Sir Herbert Taylor reminded the Duke that the payment of
over-regulation prices was already forbidden by Act of Parliament, and
that the prohibition was sanctioned by the imposition of penalties
which were, in fact, severer than those suggested by the Duke. 'But
in either case the difficulty is to establish the proof, without
which the promotion could not be cancelled, nor the officer himself,
or those parties to the transaction, dismissed the service.' What
stronger proof could we have that the illegal and immoral traffic in
over-regulation prices clung, as an inseparable parasite, to the
purchase system, and could be destroyed only by cutting down the trunk
which supported it?
We have now arrived at the year 1824. Up to that time the regulation
was still in force which obliged every officer who was in any way
concerned in any step of regimental promotion to declare on his solemn
word of honour as an officer and a gentleman that he was not, directly
or indirectly, privy to any payment made or stipulated for beyond the
regulation price. But this pledge was deliberately and systematically
violated. 'Upon this point,' says the Duke of Wellington, in the
letter to Sir Herbert Taylor already quoted, 'I believe we are all
agreed, as likewise that the certificate upon honour is useless; that
it is commonly signed whether the contents are known to be true or
known to be otherwise, and that on this ground alone it ought to be
discontinued.' Now let the reader just pause for a moment, and
consider what this implies. It means that the officer who retired, the
officer who succeeded him, and the commanding officer of the regiment
in which the transaction took place, all pledged their word and honour
as officers and gentlemen to a declaration which they knew to be a
lie. Nor were they a small minority who so acted--a minority looked
down upon by the general body of their brother officers as men who had
disgraced themselves. On the contrary, this practice of dishonouring
their plighted word was all but universal wherever the system of
purchase prevailed. At the very time when the Duke of Wellington was
bringing this serious indictment against the truthfulness and honour
of British officers, there was a debate going on in the House of
Commons on the Mutiny Act; and it was proposed to abolish the
certificate upon honour, on the ground that there was 'scarcely one
case in ten in which officers received their commissions at the
regulated price.' 'Scarcely one case in ten' in which British officers
did not violate their word of honour and subscribe their names to a
lie! And to perpetuate a system which produced this result, some two
hundred gentlemen in the House of Commons and a majority in the House
of Lords had recourse this session to tactics which, but for the
resolution of the Premier, would have wasted the best part of the
session, and brought an amount of discredit on Parliament from which
it might have found it hard to recover. But more of that anon. In pity
to the frail virtue of the British officer, the certificate upon
honour was abolished in April, 1824, and has not since been revived.
But the illegality of over-regulation prices was at the same time
reaffirmed, and the same penalties, which had proved so unavailing,
were reiterated.
This is briefly, but substantially, the history of the question up to
this year. 'The result of our inquiry,' says the Royal Commission of
1870, 'is that the payment and the receipt by officers of the army of
any sum in excess of the regulated price for the purchase, sale, or
exchange of commissions is expressly prohibited by the Act of 49 Geo.
III. c. 126.' Indeed, it was impossible that the commissioners could
have come to any other conclusion. The facts are too plain to admit of
more than one interpretation; and, moreover, the courts of justice had
already ruled the point. In a case that came before him in 1855, the
Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer decided that an undertaking by an
officer to give up his commission in a regiment in consideration of a
sum of money promised him beyond the regulated price, was an illegal
transaction, and brought the parties concerned within the provisions
and penalties of the Act of 49 Geo. III. c. 126. This construction of
the Act was confirmed, in 1862, by the Court of Common Pleas. Yet this
illegal practice has lived and thrived up to this very year, in spite
of all the attempts made at various times to put it down. 'We have no
reason to doubt,' says the Report of the Royal Commission of 1870,
'that it prevailed from the time when the prices of commissions were
first fixed in the year 1719-20;' and 'experience has shown that the
most explicit prohibitions and the most stringent regulations have
utterly failed to prevent or even check the practice.' Is there need
of further evidence to prove that it was impossible to destroy the
illegal and degrading practice of over-regulation prices without the
entire abolition of the purchase system?
We have seen how completely the officers reared under the purchase
system failed in all the requirements of their profession during the
Peninsular War. Is there any reason to believe that the same class of
officers would come scathless out of a similar ordeal now? Doubtless,
the officers of the British army have participated in the general
advancement of society in knowledge and in other respects during the
last fifty years. But has their improvement been in anything like the
same ratio as that visible in other professions? We seriously doubt
it. We believe, indeed, that we have now a far larger proportion of
able and highly-trained officers than we had when the Duke of
Wellington expressed the opinions which we have quoted. Still, taking
our officers in the aggregate, we believe that they are far below the
standard even of respectable competency. This, at all events, is the
frank confession of a distinguished officer, who happens, in addition,
to be a strenuous upholder of the purchase system. In his evidence
before the Royal Commission on military education in 1869, Lord
Strathnairn declared as follows:--
'These mistakes (which he had just mentioned) consist in
officers giving the wrong words of command, and being
unable to execute necessary, and often the simplest
movements. Some officers of long standing, and even
commanding officers, are ignorant of the simple but
important detail, the difference between a change _of
front_ and a change _of position_.... Movements are learnt
by rote for the occasion.... Hence, at my inspections, in
India as well as in Ireland, of regiments, when I have
asked officers the object of evolutions in the book, or
called on them to perform simple strategical movements
adapted to them, I have found that they are ignorant of
their use or the advantage to be derived from them in
operations.... As officers are uninstructed in the first
principles of practical or field operations and movements,
they are equally in the dark as to those of a higher order,
or which are _connected with ground_.... The whole course
of my evidence goes to prove that, owing to a mistaken
system of education and training, and want of reward for
merit, the absence of proper qualifications, of course with
exceptions, exists in all grades, including that of
commanding officers.'
These opinions do not greatly differ from those which the Duke of
Wellington expressed in Spain sixty years ago, and we believe that
they would be confirmed by every competent authority; indeed, they are
abundantly confirmed in the voluminous Blue Book from which we have
extracted them. Now, this professional ignorance is a much more
serious matter in our time than it was when the Duke of Wellington was
fighting against the armies of Napoleon; for in the scientific mastery
of his profession the British officer of that day was probably not far
behind the officers against whom he was pitted. On both sides the art
of war was learnt, for the most part, in the field, and under the
tuition of the two great captains of the age. There is very little
doubt that, but for the genius of Wellington, the Peninsular campaign
would have ended, as far as the British army was concerned, in
disaster and ignominy. But the conditions of warfare have been greatly
changed since then. Arms of precision, and other improvements in the
mechanics of war, have an increasing tendency to diminish the value of
individual dash and pluck, and to exalt in a relative proportion the
importance of professional skill. The most admirable combinations on
the part of a general may now, much more easily than heretofore, be
defeated by the bungling of a subordinate. The intelligence and
precision with which superior orders were executed by the youngest
subalterns in the German army during the late war was a theme of
general admiration; and is it not clear that an army equal to the
German in all other respects, but inferior to it in this all-important
point, must have been inevitably worsted? But subalterns are the raw
material out of which generals are made, and it stands to reason,
taking human nature as it is, that when you take from men the ordinary
incentives to exertion, they are not likely to arrive at any high
degree of excellence in their calling. A system which promotes the
indolent rich dullard over the industrious poor man of brains, is sure
to damp the energies of both: of the one because his money enables him
to obtain without labour what he covets; of the other, because he
knows that, without money, industry and brains are of no avail. The
Duke of Cambridge, in his evidence before the Royal Commission of
1870, stated, as the result of his experience, that rich young men,
having fewer motives for exertion than others, would not take the
trouble to excel in their profession. But rich young men are precisely
the class of officers who are cherished by the purchase system--men
who join the army for a few years as a fashionable pastime, but who
have never had any serious intention to make the profession of arms
the business of their life. It is notorious, on the other hand, that
the purchase system keeps in subordinate ranks many men who have
genius to command armies. Now and then they come to the surface in the
general sifting which real war occasions, but only after much mischief
has meanwhile been done by the incapacity of those whom the accident
of having a heavier purse had placed over their heads. The Indian
Mutiny discovered the talents of Sir Henry Havelock, who had been
purchased over so often that he was constrained to speak thus of
himself in his fifty-sixth year:--'The honour of an old soldier on the
point of having his juniors put over him is so sensitive that, if I
had no family to support, and the right of choice in my own hands, I
would not serve one hour longer.' Lord Clyde, in his evidence before
the Commission of 1856, says:--'I have known very many estimable men,
having higher qualities as officers than usual, men of real promise
and merit, and well educated, but who could not purchase; when such
men were purchased over, their ardour cooled, and they frequently left
the service; or, when they continued, it was from necessity, and not
from any love of the profession.' In fact, Lord Clyde was himself a
conspicuous example of the mischief of the purchase system. He had
several times been purchased over, and, but for the Crimean War, it is
probable that he would never have commanded an army.
Where, indeed, can we find a stronger argument against the purchase
system than in the Crimean war itself? The gallantry and endurance of
men and officers alike were beyond all praise. But when that admission
has been made, what else can be said with truth in praise of that
campaign? Was it not, all through, one dreary series of military
blunders and general mismanagement unrelieved by one single ray of
military genius engendered by the purchase system? A French General is
said to have characterized the British troops at Inkerman as 'an army
of lions led by asses.' Whether the epigram was really uttered by the
General in question, or was one of the inventions of the British camp,
it certainly expressed a very general feeling both at home and in the
Crimean army.
Another objection to the purchase system is, that it sets a premium on
cowardice. According to a return furnished by Messrs. Cox and Co., who
are agents for twenty-one regiments of cavalry, and one hundred and
twelve battalions of infantry, exclusive of the household cavalry and
brigade of Guards, the following is a correct statement of the
regulation prices and over-regulation prices of commissions in the
cavalry regiments for which they are agents:--
Regulation. Over-regulation. Total.