The Times 10 Apr 1855 p 6

A remonstrance which will be perused with no small amount of sympathy has been put forth, as our readers will this morning observe, by the Commissariat officers serving in the Crimea. It will not be forgotten that in the recent debates upon the mismanagement of the war, when our misfortunes had been generally attributed to the aristocratic constitution of our army, Mr. NEWDEGATE took the opportunity of arguing that such an imputation must be necessarily groundless, inasmuch as the departments in which failure had been most conspicuous were notoriously not officered from the aristocratic classes. This argument Lord PALMERSTON adopted as conveying a “most triumphant answer” to the charges advanced, and proceeded upon such assumptions to exculpate the aristocracy at the cost of the Commissariat and other departments in forms which will be found recited in the remonstrance referred to. Such reflections, coming from such a quarter, could hardly be overlooked, and accordingly the Commissariat officers of the army in the East have addressed their expostulations to the Minister of War through their immediate chief, Mr. Commissary-General FILDER. In these expostulations we think they are incontestably right on one point, but somewhat less so on another.

They are mistaken, we think, in having taken so much offence at the observations made about their relative gentility. Perhaps the language of Lord PALMERSTON conveyed unavoidably some unpleasant insinuations, but, upon the whole, what he said was unquestionably the truth; it was invited by the course of the argument, and it reflected, in reality, not the smallest discredit upon the departments concerned. Lord PALMERSTON'S remarks went to this effect, — that, since it was the Commissariat, Transport, and Medical Departments that our system had broken down, it could not be the gentry, or the aristocracy, or the noblemen of the army who were in fault, but “persons belonging to other classes of the community.” Now, here there certainly seems to be a rather disagreeable antithesis established between these “persons” and gentlemen, but this results from the turn taken by the debate, and from the different shades of interpretation assignable to a particular expression. It is one thing to assert absolutely that the members of a certain service are not “gentlemen,” and another to say that they are not taken as a body from that class of gentry which, for possessions and influence, can be identified with the aristocracy itself. This, however, was the class alluded to by Lord PALMERSTON, as his own words distinctly show, and it certainly was nothing more than the truth to say that to this class — that is, to the aristocracy of the country, comprehensively understood — the officers of the Commissariat, Medical, and Transport services do not belong so commonly as officers of the fighting branches of the army. There is, undeniably, a distinction in this respect between purely military officers and officers of the departments referred to. The fact itself is indisputable; indeed, as Lord PALMERSTON said, “nobody contended” that these branches of the army were filled by members of that aristocracy against which complaints had been directed, nor is it the smallest reproach imaginable to the officers concerned that such should be the case. Nobody doubts that they are, to use their own words, “as well educated, as well informed, and as honourable and upright in every respect as any other body of officers in the army;” and nothing further is wanted in the shape of aristocratic connexion to make them just as true “gentlemen” as the rest. They themselves put their own case unanswerably in saying, “While we conduct ourselves honourably, it matters little with what families we are connected.” Little indeed! There is folly enough in the world, GOD knows, but not quite so much as to make it a matter of consequence in the eyes of the sensible English people that a man's father should have been named SMITH or BROWN, instead of BROWNE or SMYTHE. On this point, therefore, seeing that Lord PALMERSTON stated nothing more than the fact, and that his expressions, however awkward-looking, might, to a great extent, have been divested of offence by taking them in connexion with the general course of the argument, we think there was no very great ground for complaint. If Lord PALMERSTON had affirmed conditionally that the officers of the departments in question were not gentlemen, the assertion would have implied a serious reproach; but in saying that they were not usually taken from that class of aristocratic gentry which supplies our regiments with moneyed idlers he said nothing but what was substantially true, and profoundly harmless. Very different, however, is the character of the argument itself, which, besides being utterly illogical and fallacious, is certainly offensive, and, as far as is known, unjust to the officers concerned.

To say that because our military system broke down in the Commissariat, Medical, and Transport Departments, therefore the individual officers of those departments must be chargeable with the disaster, is simply preposterous. By carrying out such an argument a little further, we might attribute all our mishaps to the failure, not of men, but of horses and carts. The Commissariat Department failed, not because assistants and deputies proved personally incapable of discharging their duty, but because no roads were made, no depôts established, and no proper means of transport provided. The Medical Department failed, not because Surgeon BROWN could not dress a wound, or Dr. JONES prescribe for a case of dysentery, but because no adequate preparation had been made for the reception of sick and wounded; because medical stores were sent to another; and because purveyors were left to squabble for authority with inspectors while patients were dying. The Transport Department failed, not because Lieutenants and Commanders were incompetent in this more than other services to perform their proper functions, but because confusion pervaded the whole service from one end to the other. And whose fault was it that all these departments found themselves thus situated?

If the argument employed in the debate means anything, it must mean this, — that, supposing the departments referred to had been filled with men taken from the ranks of the aristocratic gentry, the system would not have broken down as it did. Now, is there a single man in the kingdom who would accept such an assumption? Could anybody profess to believe that if the dressers and dispensers at Scutari had been all FITZROYS and FORTESCUES every patient in the wards would have been well cared for — for if our transport agents had been HOWARDS and TALBOTS no batch of porter would have gone astray on the seas, and that nothing but an infusion of such noble blood was wanting to make the British Commissariat as effective as the French Intendance? To bring the question to issue at once, let us ask whether the Land Transport Corps, now at length organized, has been officered from the ranks of the aristocratic gentry, as offering the only true elements of excellence? We must say it is ungenerous in the extreme to visit the faults of the whole system of administration and government upon the heads of officers whose individual exertions have in very many instances been described as highly meritorious, and who do not appear, as far as the case is yet made out, to be any more fairly chargeable with personal deficiencies than officers in other branches of the service.