“Our army,” Prince Albert wrote, in April, “has begun to return, and it will require redoubled exertions to keep up its organisation.” In fact, already an active party in the Cabinet had begun to demand heavy retrenchment on military expenditure. The Queen had long been convinced that hurried retrenchments led to wasteful panic expenditure, and was very much concerned when she heard what was being mooted in the Ministry. Hence she wrote to Lord Palmerston expressing her strong feeling that retrenchment should be moderate and gradual. “To the miserable reductions of the last thirty years,” she says, “is entirely owing our state of helplessness when the war began;” and surely, she urged, Ministers were not going to forget the lesson taught by our sufferings in the Crimea. What, however, was most seriously wanted was a new military system which would properly utilise the money already voted for the army, and prevent it from being jobbed into the hands of incompetent persons with powerful family interest. Sir De Lacy Evans, on the 4th of March, made an effort to persuade the House of Commons to abolish the purchase system, which he described as “a stain upon the service and a dishonour to England,” and Lord Goderich warmly advocated the application of some effective tests of competence to candidates for commissions. But though everybody sympathised with Evans, nobody would help him to carry out his ideas. In the abstract, said Lord Palmerston, purchase was bad. No one would propose such a system if we were establishing an army for the first time. It existed only in the British army, but, then, it did exist, and it had existed so long that it was hard to get rid of it without injustice to individuals,[284] and great expenditure in compensation. Yet the highest estimate made of the value of commissions did not exceed £8,000,000--less than half the sum voted every year by the House of Commons for the troops; and even that sum would have had to be paid, not at once, but over a long series of years, under any scheme, to release an army which had been pawned to its officers. Prince Albert, in conjunction with Lord Hardinge, drew up a plan for a new military organisation, which, however, did not touch questions of patronage or promotion. On the 19th of May the Queen laid the foundation stone of the great military hospital at Netley, the first of the kind in England, and an institution which we owe entirely to her Majesty. “Loving my dear, brave army as I do,” she writes to King Leopold, “and having seen so many of my poor sick and wounded soldiers, I shall watch over this work with maternal anxiety,”[285] A visit from Prince Frederick William of Prussia brought sunshine into the Royal household, and gladdened the heart of the Queen’s eldest daughter, who was supremely happy at once again meeting her betrothed. It was during this visit that the Princess met with an accident, on the 25th of June, that might have ended fatally.