'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.