Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol 7.djvu/120

 76 THE WINTER TROUBLES. CHAP, tion made way. With the king's reigning son ' for their ringleader, and a too servile ' Govern- Englishmen who had dared and achieved giant enterprises against the might of Napoleon were now in a humour for making riotous bonfires of their warlike machinery. Either careless of the future, or simply blind to the danger 1816. of being — even administratively — without fit The third ? . . i i i of the three war-eugmes m peace-time, they made haste to war admin- ° ■,• ■, iinr-r istrative dcstroy that establishment created by Mr JJun- forces wil- fully de- das, which, although called an ' under-secretary- stroyed. , ., , i , , • i ' ship, had been compensating, however imper- fectly, for the want of a real War Department. They thus, at a blow, dismantled the branch of Lord Bathurst's office which had concerned itself with military administration, and dismantled it too without meaning to replace the abolished establishment by any other State engine ap- pointed to do the like work. {^^) Despoiled thus of its only machinery for ministering to the national forces, and relieved of course by the peace from any belligerent duties, the com- pound 'Department of War and Colonies ' thence- forward ceased to be busied in labour connected with arms, and — undergoing no cliange in the thirty -eight years that followed — remained all that time what we found it on the eve of the conflict with liussia, — that is, an Office devoted to superintendence of Colonies, and not only uncharged with the task, l)ut unsupplied with the means of carrying on military administra- tion ; yet prospectively clothed with a right to
 * ment ' abetting him, the strange generation of