Sub-lieutenants are eligible to promotion only after passing a professional examination, and only after twelve months’ service with a regiment, under strict discipline, with liability to be removed for physical or moral unfitness. Within three years from the date of their commissions as lieutenants, officers may submit to an examination in respect to fitness for promotion to captaincies, and any officer failing to pass within three years, must retire from the army. Lieutenants are eligible to the rank of captain at any time after two years’ service in the army, having passed the examination. A captain may be made a major after two years’ service in the army; and a major is at any time eligible to a lieutenant-coloneley, which means the command of a regiment.
Every promotion must now be made on the recommendation of the Commander-in-Chief, with the approval of the Secretary of State for War; and from the principles laid down in the Royal Warrant, as will be seen further on, every precaution is taken to insure a gradual advance by seniority, and a more rapid rise by meritorious service founded on intelligent and disinterested tests. By the new Warrant the Militia is brought into closer connection with the Regular Army. To the abolition of purchase, and promotion by professional preparation and service, may be added the autumn field manœuvres, inaugurated in 1871, with 30,000 men, and the localization of the Army, by assigning a corps with staff, train, men, &c., to territorial divisions of the country.
[COUNCIL OF MILITARY EDUCATION.]
[HISTORICAL NOTICE.]
In the debates which took place in Parliament during the Crimean war, in the year 1855, attention was frequently drawn to the necessity of improving the professional education of officers, and more particularly of providing means of instruction for, and requiring special qualifications from, those who were candidates for the staff. In the course of the same year a great alteration was made in the principles which had hitherto regulated preparatory instruction for the army, by abandoning, so far as the scientific corps were concerned, the system of juvenile military education, and throwing admission to the Artillery and Engineers open to public competition among candidates whose age would afford the presumption that their general education was already completed. At the beginning of 1856 three Commissioners, Lieut.-Colonel Yolland, R.E., Lieut.-Colonel Smythe, R.A., and the Rev. W. C. Lake, were appointed by Lord Panmure, then Secretary of State for War, “to consider the best mode of reorganizing the system for training officers for the scientific corps”; and for this purpose were directed to visit the military schools of France, Prussia, Austria, and Sardinia. The instructions issued to the Commissioners informed them that it was already decided that admission to the scientific corps should be obtained by open competition, and that the age of candidates admitted to the examination should be from 17 to 20.
While the Commissioners were still engaged in their inquiries, the question of military education was frequently brought before the notice of Parliament in the course of the session of 1856, more particularly by Mr. Sidney Herbert, who, in an elaborate speech on the 5th of June, explained to the House of Commons the details of a general scheme of education for officers of all branches of the service, the outline of which he had previously sketched out while Secretary at War in 1854, in a letter to the Commander-in-Chief.
The subject of military education was one which at this time engaged the serious attention both of the Government and the public. Toward the close of the year, Major-General Lefroy (then Colonel Lefroy, and employed at the War Office as artillery adviser to the Secretary of State) was directed by Lord Panmure to draw up a general scheme for the education of officers; and numerous plans, with a similar object, were about the same period proposed for the consideration of the Secretary of State.
The military educational establishments which existed in 1856 were as follows: