ed arrangement, but we have had to work in
the face of the most dire opposition on the part of a great number of
people who ought to have been the first to help us. ["Hear! Hear!"] The
Chairman has referred to the opposition of the Press; but that has been
nothing to the opposition we have met with in our own profession--the
profession of ten, fifteen, or twenty years ago, when great reforms were
begun in the Army by the ablest War Secretary who has ever been in
office--I mean Lord Cardwell. His name is now almost forgotten by the
present generation, and also the names of many other distinguished
officers in their day, whose names were associated with many of the
brightest moments of English victory and English conquest, and who set
their faces honestly against alteration, and firmly believed that the
young men of those days were a set of madmen and a set of Radicals who
were anxious to overturn not only the British Army, but the whole
British Constitution with it. [Laughter.] This prejudice spread into
high places, until at last we were looked upon as a party of faddists
who ought to be banished to the farthest part of our dominions. [Renewed
laughter.] But I am glad to say that the tree we planted then took root,
and there gradually grew up around us a body of young officers, men
highly instructed in their profession, who supported us, carried us
through, and enabled us to arrive at the perfection which, I think, we
have now attained. ["Hear! Hear!"]

There has been abroad in the Army for a great many years an earnest
desire on the part of a large section, certainly, to make themselves
worthy of the Army and worthy of the nation by whom they were paid, and
for whose good they existed. That feeling has become more intensified
every year, and at the present moment, if you examine the Army List, you
will find that almost all the Staff Officers recently gone out to South
Africa have been educated at the Staff College, established to teach the
higher science of our profession and to educate a body of men who will
be able to conduct the military affairs of the country when it comes to
their turn to do so. Those men are now arriving at the top of the tree,
thank God! while many of those magnificent old soldiers under whom I was
brought up have disappeared from the face of the earth, and others who
are to be seen at the clubs have come round--they have been converted in
their last moments [laughter]; they have the frankness to