Happily for the present generation, matters have changed since those corrupt times, in many--many respects for the better. The British army is no longer looked upon by the people as a costly and not very useful toy, chiefly maintained for the diversion of royalty; we now recognize and respect in it an important national engine, for the proper condition and conduct of which--as for that of the navy--a Secretary of State is directly responsible to Parliament. But a change of such magnitude has not been carried out without much peevish remonstrance and factious opposition on the part of the many whose patronage it has diminished, and whose power it has curtailed; and there are still not a few who offer what opposition they dare to its harmonious consummation. It is to be feared that a slight leaven of the same spirit which, sixty years ago, wasted the resources and paralyzed the energies of this powerful nation, may, perchance, still linger around the precincts of Whitehall and St. James’s,--and it is not impossible that when the SMITH AND ELDER of the twentieth century present to the public their first editions of the _Panmure Papers_ and the _Herbert Memoirs_, facts, bearing on the disasters of the Crimean war, and on the invasion panic of 1859–60, may for the first time be made known--not entirely different from those with which we have recently become acquainted through _The Cornwallis Correspondence_. FOOTNOTES: [5] “The duke has very unwisely taken over three or four boys of the Guards as his aides-de-camp: which will be of great disservice to him, and can be of no use to them.”--_Lord Cornwallis to Lt.-Col. Ross, 1784._ [6] Three or four of the Prince of Wales’s letters are given at length. They all prove “the first gentleman and scholar of his day” to have been a very illiterate and unscrupulous jobber. In one of them he proposed to the Governor-General to displace “a black, named Alii Cann,” who was chief criminal judge of Benares, in order that a youth, named Pellegrine Treves, the son of a notorious London money-lender, might be appointed to that office. Lord Cornwallis replied, that Ali Ibrahim Khan, though a native, was one of the most able and respected public servants in India, and that it would be a most difficult and unpopular step to remove him; and that even if his post were vacant, the youth and inexperience of the money-lender’s son rendered him utterly ineligible for such an important trust. One of the causes of complaint which H. R. H. urged against his royal parent was, that he, also, was not intrusted with high military command.