The half-civil, half-military instruction of the army aspirant, the Sandhurst cadet, began to partake more of the latter character than the former; and was to be changed still more in another decade or thereabout. The utter failure of the staff in the Crimea had pointed out, what all foreign nations had already recognised, that a special training for some, if not all, of the staff officers of the future was advisable. So the Staff College came into being in 1858, and first established, more fully than the old “Senior Department” of the Royal Military College of Sandhurst, the principle that the work of the staff in the future can only be learned by studying the mistakes and successes of the past; that the art of war is by no means conjectural, but that he who knows what has been done can learn from that teaching how to do it again and do it better. The age of the “heaven-born soldier,” a rarity even greater than the black swan, was a thing of the past. To pitchfork unknown or untried men into the most difficult of all duties, that of working the machinery that makes or mars an army--its staff work--belonged to an earlier age than now. But another great movement arose, the end of which no man can foresee, save that it has saved the nation from the dire evils of conscription. No really free nation ever has or ever will accept the fetters of compulsory service unless it feels there is a real reason for it. Nothing but actual invasion would ever make free Englishmen accept conscription as a principle, though they accepted in the long war what was almost worse. The pressgang, compulsory service in its worst, most one-sided, and most cruel form, was endured, but hated. But when, however, our late ally, France, irritated by the fact that our free political institutions did not admit of our handing over to her tender mercies men who, however ruffianly, had threatened the life of the Emperor Napoleon on political grounds only, and when the colonels of her army asked in the intensity of their sycophancy (for, as after events proved, the third Napoleon had no great hold on the affections of his people) to be led against “_la perfide Albion_,” the old spirit rose. The spirit of individual help towards the national defence had been clearly shown as that of boyhood when the century was yet in its teens; in 1853 it had its second stage of youth; and finally in our time was to grow into first adolescence, and then vigorous manhood.