The Army in 1837 consisted, in actual strength, of about 100,000 men, of whom 19,000 were in India and 20,000 in Ireland. There had been a strong movement after the peace to abolish the army altogether, on the ground that another war was almost unthinkable. The Duke of Wellington was only able to keep up this small force by hiding it away in distant parts of the empire; the total number of troops in Great Britain was only 26,000. Officers were ordered to efface themselves by never wearing uniform except on parade. A Royal Duke could not be given a military funeral, because 'there were not troops enough to bury a Field Marshal.' As to the quality of the troops, the Duke frequently called them 'the scum of the earth,' and the brutal discipline of the time did everything to justify this description, for the soldier was supposed to have surrendered all his rights as a man and a citizen. The privates enlisted for life or for twenty-one years, and it was so difficult to get recruits that they were frequently caught while drunk, or frankly kidnapped. They were dressed, for campaigning in the tropics, in high leather stocks and buttoned up jackets, so that hundreds died of heat apoplexy. Lord Wolseley thinks that in 1837 50,000 Frenchmen could have easily taken London. Nor was the danger of a French invasion at all remote. The Volunteer movement, the social effects of which were excellent, was mainly due to the Prince Consort, a far wiser man than was recognised during his lifetime. The Crimean War revealed in glaring colours the incompetence of the military authorities and of the Cabinet at home. If we had been fighting against any European power except Russia, with whom utter mismanagement is a tradition, there can be no doubt that our army would have been destroyed, as it ought to have been at Inkerman. The military credit of the nation was only partially restored by the prompt suppression of the Indian Mutiny. Yet here again the age of hope and progress made good its professions. The mistakes in the Boer War seem not to have been nearly so bad as those in the Crimea. It would be easy to go through the other departments of national life--the Navy, Finance, Colonial and Indian Policy, the growth and distribution of Wealth, Locomotion and Transport, Education, Science, Medicine and Surgery, and to prove that the progress during the reign of Queen Victoria was quite unprecedented. The creed of optimism was natural and inevitable at such a time, though cool heads might remember the line of Publilius Syrus, Ubi nil timetur, quod timeatur nascitur.