The Sun.
London, England, 1855-12-18 00:00:00

Spirit of the Public Journals.

(Front the Times of tltis day.)
We have at length obtained, and that with no
little difficulty—and exactly four months from the
day on which it is dated—the memorial of the
Colonels and Lieutenant-Colonels commanding the
Guards to her Majesty. It bears date the 17th of
August, is bedecked in a brilliant cherry-coloured
cover, as becomes a document signed by two Field-
Marshals, and subscribed by Prince Albert, Lord
Strafford, the Duke of Cambridge, and Colonels
Wood, Upton, and Moncrieff. We should say that
the composition, on the whole, is rather superior
to the usual style of such things, and that the tone
is sedulously moderate and inoffensive. Many and
earnest are the protestations that the officers of the
Guards have no wish to oppose the accelerated
promotion of their comrades of the Line. All that
is asked is that they may not be treated with less
favour than their brethren. We will give to our
readers a brief analysis of this memorial, both that
they may be better able to understand the merits
of the case, because we have here, for the first
time, from unexceptionable authority, a key to
that mystery of mysteries, the organisation and
promotion of the Household Troops. The Brigade
of Foot Guards—for the Life Guards are content
to be governed by the same rules as other cavalry
regiments—the Brigade of Foot Guards, we say, is
composed of three regiments the Grenadier
Guards, consisting of three battalions, and the
Coldstream and Scotch Fusiliers, having each two
battalions. Each regiment is commanded by a
Colonel ; each battalion by an officer called a Regi-
mental Major, who has the rank of colonel in the
army; each company by a Captain and Lieutenant-
Colonel, the two senior of whom command the bat-
talion in the absence of their superiors, with the
title of "Acting-Majors or Mounted Officers." The
Lieutenants have the rank of Captain, and the
Ensigns, in consideration of their good conduct at
Waterloo, where we suppose no other ensigns did
anything respectable, received the rank of Lieu-
tenant.
Surely, there is something here which does not
smack of alxsolute equality, something that must be
removed before the wish of the Colonels of the
Guards, that promotion in the Line should be
placed on an equality with theirs, can be said to be
fully obtained ? If equality be really desired no-
thing is easier. Do away with all these unneces-
sary and puzzling distinctions ; organize the House-
hold Troops like any others ; let each officer hold
only one grade of rank in the army, instead of two,
and then apply the same rules of promotion to all.
We submit the proposition to the serious considera-
tion of the much-enduring men who have signed
this memorial. But this is a part of the subject
on which it does not suit the Colonels of the
Guards to dwell. They assume that the single ob-
ject of an officer's life is to become a General, and
they undertake to show that the Guards, who have
heretofore obtained the rank of General in much
larger proportion to their numbers than any other
corps, will, by the Royal warrant of the 6th of
October, 1854, be placed in an inferior position in
this respect to all other regiments in the army.
This warrant provides that the rank of full Colonel
shall be given to officers after serving for three
years as Lieutenant-Colonel in the actual command
of regiments, or as mounted officers in the Guards,
or to Captains aid Lieutenant-Colonels in the Guards
who have served for six years. This is the crying
injustice, this is the. regulation which degrades the
Guards below their brethren of the Line. Now,
we are bound to confess that, considering that
officers in the Guards are Lieutenants, Captains,
and Lieutenant-Colonels when officers in the
Line of the same standing are only Ensigns,
Lieutenants, and Captains, we should not have
thought it unreasonable if, to compensate this
unfair and undue partiality in the lower grades,
some obstacle had I) een interposed by which the
accession of Guards' officers to the rank of Colonel
and General had designedly been made slower than
in the Line. The attainment to the rank of Ge-
neral is not the only or principal object of an officer,
and many would be glad to barter a quicker pro-
motion to the higher grades for the advantage of
more rapid and immediate advancement to the
lower ones. There is, however, in the theory of
the warrant no such inequality ; for the Colonels
of the Guards do not even attempt to assert that
the two senior Captains and Lieutenant-Colonels,
or Mounted Officers, as they are called, in the
Guards, who only command in the absence of the
Regimental Major, are more than equal in rank to
Lieutenant-Colonels in the actual command of
regiments, or that Captains of six years' standing
good a claim.
have even so What the Colonels of
the Guards really undertake to prove to her Ma-
jesty, is, that the average service in the Line of an
officer before ho obtains the rank of Lieutenant-
Colonel is 22 years and 2 months, while the ave-
rage service of an Acting Major or Mounted Officer
in the Guards is 24 years and 11 months—so that
the Guards are two years longer in arriving at the
starting point for Generals than the Lieutenant-
Colonels of the Line ;
and, discarding those Lieu-
tenant-Colonels who obtained their commissions
without purchase (a purely arbitrary elimination),
the difference is three years and four months against
the Guards and in favour of the Line.
We have said we see no reason whatever why
Lieutenant-Colonels who have obtained their com-
missions without purchase should be excluded from
the comparison. Purchase prevails in the Line, as
in the Guards, and we cannot in applying an ab-
stract principle take notice that it is more frequent
among the latter than among the former. Let
us grant, then, that in times of peace, to which
the memorial confines itself, an officer becomes
Lieutenant-C. olonelin the Line two years sooner
than an Acting Major or Mounted Officer in the
Guards, which is the whole case of the memorial.
Is there any injustice in this, or rather, if it were
not so, would not such a state of things be of itself
evidence of the grossest inequality and injustice ?
Compare the life of an officer in the Guards with
that of an officer in the Line, earl this truth will at
once appear. The Guardsman lives in London apart
from his men, discharging most of his duties by
deputy, in comfort and luxury, in a climate conge-
nial to English constitutions, ie excellent society,
in the midst of his friends, with no inducement to
quit the service, and, indeed, with little prospect
of changing so agreeable and eligible position for a
better. He may, with ordinary good luck, spend
a long life in a red coat, in the practice of very few
of the duties and the experience of none o f the dan-
gers of his profession. The duties of his commis-
sions
sit almost as lightly upon him as those of lu
Colonel, the Prince Consort himself. What is
there to cause rapid promotion in such a corps or
to withdraw members from a society of jolly fellows
who have in time of peace all the pleasures of a
club, with the extra advantage of being paid for
belonging to it ?
Take, oa the other hand, the case of the ordi-
nary regimental officer. The world is all before him,
but not where to choose. He is destined, if he
stick to the service, to endure hardships such a s
no other army in time of peace, and very few . in
time of war, is called upon to endure. There! is, the
wearisome monotony of country tparters in
Eng-
land, or, still worse, iu Ireland ; the eternal cigar,
the everlasting game at billiards, the greasy circu-
lating library novel, and the flirtation with the
confectioner's daughter. The scene changes—he is
shivering by the frozen banks of the St. Lawrence,
sweltering in a West Indian island, recovering
from his fifth attack of yellow fever in the putrid
swamps of Guiana, or nursing the remains of
his liver in a dreary cantonment of India. If there
is anything to be done in which there is much hazard
and little glory—a New Zealand Chief to be taken
out of his pab, a rebellion of gold-diggers to be put
down, fanatical Santals or homicidal Moplahs to be
quelled, Caffres to be dislodged half-a-dozen times
in a year from the same rock—these, and a hun-
dred similar duties, all fall on the Line, and make
up, even in times of peace, a very considerable