It is worthy of remark, that this recommendation was concealed from his son, and only communicated to him after his father’s death by Lieutenant Hargood, General Havelock’s aide-de-camp. This circumstance is to be regretted on many grounds: if the telegram had been submitted to young Havelock before it was forwarded to the Commander-in-Chief, we are certain, from our personal knowledge of his character, that he would have so modified certain expressions it contains as to have avoided wounding the tender sensibilities of those who felt aggrieved by them. Without doing any injustice to himself he might have done more justice to Major Stirling, and the officers of the 64th; but the responsibility rests not with him but with his father, who, before the storm excited by the publication of this telegram had burst forth, had already gone the way of all living, and was indifferent to popular praise or blame. The Cross of Valour was awarded to Lieutenant Havelock in March, 1858, and on reading it in the _Gazette_, the officers of the 64th Regiment, considering that they had just cause of complaint against both father and son, addressed a letter of expostulation to Sir Colin Campbell, the Commander-in-Chief in India. There is no reason to believe that the gallant old chief was actuated by any personal feeling in the matter, but he felt it to be his duty to forward the letter of expostulation to His Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge, accompanying it with certain strictures implying grave censure on father and son. Men who have spent so many years in the service as Lord Clyde are naturally opposed to innovations. There is a certain period in life when we all become conservative in principle. Old men, since the days of Homer, have ever been prone to exalt the past at the expense of the present; and Lord Clyde was no exception to this rule. He regarded the Victoria Cross with the same distrust with which he regarded every other innovation. In his own hot youth he had exhibited the most daring courage at Badajoz, and elsewhere, when there was no Victoria Cross to be earned; and he held that courage, like virtue, was its own reward. Devotion to duty, without regard to after consequences, was the principle by which he himself was guided during his long career; the soldier who was animated by a sense of duty required no outward stimulus. The promise or expectation of some badge of distinction as a reward for heroism or gallantry in the field was sufficient, in his opinion, to incite young officers ambitious of honour and reckless of their own lives to rush into rash enterprises without consulting their superiors. Discipline, or, in other words, subjection to lawful authority, he esteemed the highest ornament in every young soldier; no heroic action could atone for any violation of this primary duty.