While the second battalion of the Royal Irish regiment was winning its spurs in New Zealand, the first was quartered in southern India. At the end of 1865 it was ordered home; volunteering into other corps was permitted, and 381 non-commissioned officers and men elected to finish their service in the East, while 29 officers[225] and 450 other ranks, with 44 women and 72 children, embarked in February, 1866, at Bombay in two ships, the slower of which did not reach England until the end of June. Two years later the battalion was sent to Ireland, and in August, 1871, was warned for another tour of foreign service. This order filled all ranks with dismay, for if any corps in the British army had the right to expect a long rest at home it was the first battalion of the XVIIIth. Since 1692, when it first landed on the Continent, it had spent a hundred and nineteen years out of the United Kingdom, and between 1837, when it sailed for Ceylon, and its return from India in 1866, it had served abroad with one short break of less than six months’ duration; it had fought with distinction in China, in Burma, and in the Crimea, and had shared in the suppression of the Indian Mutiny. To explain why the War Office sent the first battalion on foreign service again so quickly, it becomes necessary to allude briefly to the long series of changes in the organisation of the army which began to take effect in 1870. The strain thrown on the military resources of Britain by the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny had convinced even the most determined economists in the House of Commons not only that the army was too small, but that it was utterly lacking in power of rapid expansion in case of need. To increase its numbers in time of peace was comparatively easy, and by the addition in 1858-59 of second battalions to the twenty-five senior regiments of the line, the infantry was materially strengthened. But to render the army more elastic, more fit to meet a sudden national emergency, was a far more difficult matter. The process by which the XVIIIth was brought up to war strength for the Crimea[226] was the only method then known for making a regiment ready to take the field, for as there were no reservists to replace men too weakly or too young for a campaign, the ranks of a corps ordered on active service could only be filled by the depletion of other units, which by this process of “robbing Peter to pay Paul” were reduced to impotence, until they in turn had obtained recruits and trained the raw material into soldiers. Of the various attempts to form an adequate reserve one only was successful--the “militia reserve,” composed of the best men in the constitutional force, who for a small annual retaining fee undertook in case of need to serve as regular soldiers in any part of the world. But this was only a reversion to the methods of the Crimean days, for it called away the pick of the militia at the moment when they were required, if not for active service, at least