attention must be called to ◆March 7.◆ a notable new departure in the formation of a Corps of Waggoners in five companies, with a total strength of six hundred non-commissioned officers and men, one-tenth of them artificers. This was the first attempt at a military organisation of the transport-service. It was reckoned that, in one way and another, at least thirty thousand men were enlisted for the regular Army between November 1793 and March 1794,[193] and the number was the more astonishing since Fencibles and substitutes for the Militia had absorbed a large number of recruits. It would, however, be a fallacy to suppose that Ministers had yet thought out any regular plan for continual filling of the ranks; on the contrary, they had resorted to a variety of hasty expedients founded upon no fixed principle, and therefore unfitted to meet more than a temporary emergency. Such procedure is invariably wasteful and extravagant in the highest degree; but Yonge and Dundas honestly believed themselves to have found true economy in a clever and specious scheme put forward by one of the Generals in Ireland, for defraying the cost of new levies by the sale of commissions.[194] The experiment was tried on a grand scale and with high hopes, not unmingled with misgiving, on the part of officers; and indeed the prospect of raising a large number of men without charge to the country was sufficiently alluring. None the less the scheme failed completely,[195] as is the common fate of all projects which aspire to obtain a costly article at a trifling outlay.