It is curious to note, in referring to this period, what was the opinion of distinguished officers, both as regards the education necessary for an officer and what his expenses should be. Of course these were “piping times of peace” everywhere save in India; and the army, “kept in the background,” took little place in the general life of the nation. With regard to such education, Sir John Burgoyne considered that the first four rules of arithmetic were sufficient for the young officer, and that with regard to fractions, “it is going a little too far.” He did not think one boy out of fifty could do either “simple equations or a little French,” that not one “educated gentleman” out of fifty could do “a sum of addition or subtraction by logarithms.” He was not of opinion that a knowledge of the theoretical part of the profession was necessary to make a very good subaltern officer, and thought it was not even required “to make a very good commanding officer in the field.” He saw no good in such training. He doubted “if the Duke of Wellington had any very high theoretic knowledge; it is very likely that he could not have solved a problem in Euclid, or even worked out a question in simple equations or logarithms.” When the leaders of the army held these views, it is not surprising that the educational standard of the examination for admission to the army was not high. So we find General Wetherall was not “a friend to an examination before an officer enters the army.” He thought the Horse Guards’ principle in looking over the papers of candidates for direct commissions very fair, when “if they find that the questions which a boy cannot pass are not very material, they allow the boy to pass.” But the same officer foreshadows the system that afterwards obtained, for a time, in agreeing with Lord Monck’s view that after the preliminary examination for the commission, he should be sent “for a year or two to the senior department at Sandhurst, before he was put to regimental duties.”