A parallel could be found to all these examples at this day, it may be said. It is quite possible, for such ill weeds once sown are not easily eradicated, but the roots of the evil lay far deeper then than now in the overpowering supremacy of the Secretary-at-War. That official throughout this period continued to correspond directly with every grade of officer from the colonel to the corporal, whether to give orders, commendation, or rebuke, wholly ignoring the existence of superior officers as channels of communication and discipline.[54] His powers in other directions are indicated by the phrase, "Secretary-at-War's leave of absence,"[55] which was granted to subalterns, without the slightest reference to their colonels, to enable them to vote for the Government's candidate at by-elections.[56] We find him filling up a vacancy in a regiment without a word to the colonel,[57] instructing individual colonels of dragoons when they shall turn their horses out to grass,[58] and actually giving the parole to the guard during the King's absence from St. James's.[59] All these orders, relating to purely military matters, were issued, of course, by the King's authority, though not always in the King's name; and, indeed, as the volume of work increased, directions, criticisms, and reproofs tended more and more to be communicated by a clerk by order of the Secretary-at-War. In fact, the absolute control of the Army was usurped by a civilian official who, while arrogating the exercise of the royal authority, abjured every tittle of constitutional responsibility. The result of such a system in such an age as that of Walpole may be easily imagined. All sense of military subordination among officers was lost. Their road to advancement lay, not by faithful performance of their duty for the improvement of their men and the satisfaction of their superiors, but by gaining, in what fashion soever, the goodwill of the Secretary-at-War,[60]--by granting this man his discharge, advancing that to the rank of corporal, pardoning a third the crime of desertion. "Our generals," said the Duke of Argyll in the House of Lords at the opening of the Spanish War, "are only colonels with a higher title, without power and without command ... restrained by an arbitrary minister.... Our armies here know no other power but that of the Secretary-at-War, who directs all their motions and fills up all vacancies without opposition and without appeal."[61] Well might General Wade be believed when he asserted that the discipline of the Army was as bad as it could be. CHAPTER II [Sidenote: 1714-1739.]