ection such momentous consequences flowed--the victory of
Prussian arms at Sadowa. The victory was a surprise, for even Lord Clyde,
after a close inspection of the Prussian army, had found no more to report
than that it was a first-rate militia. Sadowa disclosed that a soldier,
serving only between two and three years with the colours, could yet show
himself the most formidable combatant in Europe. The principle of
Cardwell's plan was that short enlistment is essential to a healthy
organisation of the army, and this reform it was that produced an
efficient reserve, the necessity for which had been one of the lessons of
the Crimean war. A second, but still a highly important element, was the
reduction of the whole force serving in the colonies from fifty thousand
men to less than half that number.(232) "To this change," said Mr.
Cardwell, "opposition will be weak, for the principle of colonial
self-reliance is very generally assented to." The idea, as Lord Wolseley
says, that a standing army during peace should be a manufactory for making
soldiers rather than either a costly receptacle for veterans, or a
collection of perfectly trained fighters, "had not yet taken, hold of the
military mind in England."(233) The details do not concern us here, and
everybody knows the revolution effected by the changes during Mr.
Gladstone's great administration in the composition, the working, and the
professional spirit of the army.

(M116) Army reform first brought Mr. Gladstone into direct collision with
reigning sentiment at court. In spite of Pym and Cromwell and the untoward
end of Charles I. and other salutary lessons of the great rebellion, ideas
still lingered in high places that the sovereign's hand bore the sword,
and that the wearer of the crown through a commander-in-chief had rights
of control over the army, not quite dependent on parliament and secretary
of state. The Queen had doubted the policy of disestablishing the church
in Ireland, but to disestablish the commander-in-chief came closer home,
and was disliked as an invasion of the personal rights of the occupant of
the throne. This view was rather firmly pressed, and it was the first of a
series of difficulties--always to him extremely painful, perhaps more
painful than any other--that Mr. Gladstone was called upon in his long
career to overcome. The subject was one on which the temper of a reforming
parliament allowed no compromise, even if the prime minister himself h