hundred and sixty officers who have received
the most finished military education it is
possible to attain in the world, and who are
always ready to fill up vacancies in the higher
departments, or to form a staff for an army
taking the field.

Is there any difference, O my countrymen,
and what difference, between this system and
the system of the English service! Amongst
my friends on this side the Channel, I can
also number a staff officer, whom I have
known some years. A better fellow, or more
honorable man than Charley Benson does not
exist; but what there is in him to make a
staff officer out of I never could imagine.
He entered the service about five years ago,
and, having an uncle a general officer in
command of an Irish district, was made aide-
de-camp to that relative when he had
done two years' duty with his regiment.
The war in the Crimea broke out,
and his uncle having good interest at the
Horse Guards, got Charley named a deputy-
assistant quartermaster-general with the
army. What the duties of the appointment
may be, I don't exactly know, and I am
very certain Charley himself does not. He
writes me that he has a lot of paper-work
and returns to make out; but that with a
good sergeant for a clerk, he manages to
make it all serene.

Poor Charley! I can imagine how sorely
puzzled he would be if left to his own
resources with pen, ink, and paper. He can
write a reasonably sensible letter when he
likes, (it is not often that he does like,) but
is decidedly eccentric in his orthography. As to
the higher branches of mathematics, he knows
nothing whatever of them. He can add up
the various sums of money set down in the
fly-leaves of his cheque-book, and so tell
whether he has overdrawn his account with
Messrs. Cox, the army agents; but beyond
this his capabilities for figures does not
extend. Topography, fortification, military
drawing, military history, and military
statistics, he denounces—when they are
mentioned in his presence by the energetic
monosyllable—rot! As to military
manoeuvres on a grand scale, Charley says he
got through his drill under the adjutant
of his regiment, and what more would you
have? Moreover, he is now on the staff, and
having good interest, intends to remain
there for some time; so what use, to him,
would be any further drilling? When the
war is over he is to join his uncle, an elderly
gentleman, who, after having been thirty
years on half-pay, was appointed not long
ago to the command of an Irish district, and
is now about to proceed out to India as
commander-in-chief of an Indian Presidency, where
he will reign supreme over a native army, of
whose language he does not understand one
word, in a country he has never so much as
read of. In Bombay or Madras he will enjoy
a salary of twelve hundred pounds a-year.

Of what use, therefore, can military education
be to my friend Charley Benson? He is one of
the fortunate men of this world, who, having
good interest, need not trouble his head with
the why or the wherefore of this or that science.
As aide-de-camp, his chief duties are to dress
well, carve well, dance well, ride well, help
to do the honors of his uncle's house, and
occasionally attend that relative to the
review or inspection of a regiment. His
training for the staff consisted in going
through a couple of years' regimental duty
with his corps; and, although whilst there he
learnt nothing which could be of the slightest
advantage to him either as an aide-de-camp or
a deputy quartermaster-general, he now finds
himself quite on a par with his brother
staff-officers as regards any knowledge of his
duties.

Nor is he altogether a bad specimen of
the English staff-officer. There are some
few holding such appointments who have in
a certain degree qualified themselves for the
post by a couple of years' study at the senior
department of the Military College at
Sandhurst; but the certificates obtained by these
gentlemen never got them on the staff. Their
nominations were coincidences, and would have
been equally certain had they no qualification
whatever. In a work lately published by an
officer of the English army, whose character
and accomplishments guarantee the truth of
what he asserts, the writer states: "I have
reason to believe that from eighteen hundred
and fifteen to eighteen hundred and fifty-four
—a period of thirty-nine years—not one single
appointment on the staff of the army has
been made in consequence of the officer
having graduated at Sandhurst."* And
further, the same author informs us that,
according to the Army List for May last,
twenty-five officers of the Guards hold staff
appointments, of whom only five ever studied
at Sandhurst, and not one of whom received
a first-class certificate.
* Notes on Military Education. By Captain J. Morton
Spearman, R.A. London, Parker, 1853.

From another little work on military education†
which was published just before the
present war commenced, we learn that out of
ninety-one officers employed in the general
staff of the army in eighteen hundred
and fifty-two, seven only had graduated
at the senior department of Sandhurst, and
that out of one hundred and seventeen staff-
officers of pensioners in the same year, three
only had obtained certificates. But a stronger
instance of the utter inutility of English
officers studying to qualify themselves for
the staff has yet to be told. According to
a parliamentary return called for during the
last session, and published early in the month
of May, there were then one hundred and
thirty-five officers serving on the staff of the