STATESMEN. No. 173.

THE RIGHT HONOURABLE LORD SANDHURST, G.C.B., G.C.S.I.

BORN five-and-fifty years ago, William Mansfield became a soldier at sixteen, saw considerable service in India, and before he was thirty enjoyed the command of a regiment in the Punjaub campaign, as well as subsequent employment on the Peshawur frontier. When thirty-six he was blessed by the outbreak of the Crimean War so far as to be discovered for a man supposed to be capable of giving military advice, which he was sent to furnish, to Lord Stratford de Redcliffe at Constantinople and in the Crimea, not with any brilliant military results. Another blessing soon befel him in the shape of the Indian Mutiny, in which he was chief of the Staff, and served throughout the war, receiving for his feats the thanks of Parliament. At forty-one he was made Commander-in-Chief of the Bombay Army, at forty-six he was appointed Commander-in-Chief for the whole of India, and finally in 1870 he became Commander-in-Chief in Ireland—a post which he displayed an almost ecclesiastical reluctance to accept. He was, however, happily soon called to London to provide a Secretary of State with a military policy, and to him falls mainly any credit there may be due for the elaboration of the details of the Abolition of Purchase in the Army. He watched it through the House of Commons, and was made a peer and styled a statesman in order to talk it on its way through the House of Lords. This great achievement has confirmed and increased the popularity he has always enjoyed among his brothers-in-arms, and will cause his name to be remembered to all time by a grateful army with that of Cardwell.

Lord Sandhurst has always found it necessary to give much of his time and attention to his domestic concerns, and it is painful to find that this necessity has not been taken into anything like sufficient consideration by his military superiors. The notion of a general being called to account for sending detached signatures to be gummed on official reports, and made to refund public moneys for making mistakes in official returns, is so manifestly destructive of all discipline, that right-minded men must see in its adoption by some members of Parliament only another proof of the want of discretion of that body.

Lord Sandhurst has been married for no less than twenty years.