The Duke of Wellington has since taught us, on more than one occasion, that there are some extraordinary workmen who can do good work with any tools, and who can even make their own tools as they require them.--But in England, in 1801, the military workmen in court employ were all so execrably bad, that it mattered little what was the quality of the tools supplied to them. The Duke of York, David Dundas, and Lord Chatham had everything their own way: the most important posts, the most costly expeditions, were intrusted, not to the officers most formidable to the enemy, but to the friends and _protégés_ of the military courtiers who stood best at Windsor and St. James’s. It is no small proof of Cornwallis’s tact in judging of men, that whilst we find him deprecating the employment in independent commands of such generals as the Dukes of Gloucester and Cumberland, Dundas, Burrard (of Cintra), Coote (of Ostend), Pulteney (of Ferrol), Whitelock (of Buenos Ayres), and Lord Chatham (of Walcheren), he had always a word of approval for Lake and Abercromby, and in an introductory letter to Sir John Shore, speaks of the lieutenant-colonel of his own regiment, the Hon. Arthur Wesley, as a “sensible man and a good officer.” Throughout the whole of _The Cornwallis Correspondence_, there is no single hint of stinted means for the defence of the country, there is no single doubt cast upon the personal bravery of our officers and our men; but there are many out-spoken complaints of utter incompetence and reckless extravagance on the part of those who had the chief conduct of our military affairs. From 1795 to 1805--that time of fear--we have now incontrovertible testimony that both England and Ireland were in an indefensible condition, had an invader landed with a very moderate body of such soldiers as Humbert led; and that that condition was owing in no degree to any want of manliness or liberality on the part of the British nation, but solely and entirely to the want of capacity of the men whom it pleased the court, in spite of repeated disgrace and defeat, perversely to maintain in the management and command of the army.[13]