We all know how elderly officers cry up, and Young England cries down, the heroes, habits, manners, and customs of our army during the Peninsula war. But in the matter of staff officers and their qualifications, the force under Wellesley in Spain was certainly in advance of that commanded by Codrington in the Crimea. According to a military authority I have already quoted,[4] there was during the Peninsula war “only one officer employed on the quartermaster-general’s staff who was not a graduate of the senior department of the Royal Military College.” And the same gentleman, writing about a year before the war with Russia broke out, says, “It is by many doubted whether, in the event of a new war, there exists in the British army the necessary materials for the construction of an efficient état-major, or corps of staff officers, such as accompanied the troops under Sir John Abercrombie to Egypt and Sir Arthur Wellesley to Portugal.” [Footnote 4: Notes on Military Education, by Captain Spearman, page 35, note.] Still stronger evidence against the existing system is afforded us a little farther on in the same pamphlet, where Captain Spearman states that, “as an introduction to staff employment, the officers of the army have long since abandoned the senior department at Sandhurst in hopeless despair.” The writer then asks “to what is the disinclination, not to say repugnance, so generally evinced by British officers to devote themselves to the study of war as a science to be attributed? Clearly to the want of due encouragement--to the practical denial of the usual reward of such devotion and toil.” “Staff appointments” (in the English army), says Colonel Beamish in his work mentioned above, “are made without any reference to scientific qualification--because the wish of a lord is more potent than the judgment of a professor; and the most distinguished Sandhurst students have been left to look in vain for congenial professional employment, and some reward for their many hours of labour and anxious preparation.... How different,” continues the same writer, “is the practice with our enlightened neighbours! Staff employment in France is the reward of merit alone. It is sought for by the élite of the army, and obtained only by the severest study, and the most indisputable proofs of the possession of the highest degree of professional excellence and general intelligence. Thus are formed those well-instructed officers who constitute the état-major of the French army, and afterwards become their most distinguished generals of division and brigade.”