 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.