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 422 APPENDIX. executed by the Horse Guards (now brought into the same range of building) or by any other branch of the War Office, but is also armed with the power which such a burthen implies ; so that — merely to give one example— he can insist that the grant of every commission, though still passing through the Horse Guards, shall bo in conformity with his will. This happy conclusion of troubles which long had liampered the State was hardly attained in its fulness until the year 1872, when the principal Order in Council of 1870, with also some further arrangements of later date, had come into due operation ; and, indeed, within recent times, an almost opposite kind of solution was apparently judged to be endurable by our patient country. It is actually true that Mr Sidney Herbert's patent as Secretary of State for War contained a provision excluding him — that is, excluding the State ! — from the right of making army appointments. The gracious Royal consent giving sanction a few years afterwards to the welcome change we have hailed, was an Act superbly contrasting with the general tenor of ' i:>ei-sonal ' sovereignty as wielded in other days ; was a victory achieved over Self by the genuine State Queen ; was, beyond all comparing, the greatest feat of her reign, and may well be remembered with gratitude — remembered even in times when all the cant praises sliall cease, and praises in earnest begin. NOTES TO CHAPTER V. Note 1. — When the orders came out which suddenly shifted the theatre of war from Bulgaria to the Crimea, Mr Filder had already collected 5000 beasts of transport. Note 2. — Mr Filder, the Commissary-General, was apparently the first to hazard a conjecture in this du-ection. When he saw the Allies marching as a 'movable column' and suffering the Cossacks to ride round them, he sagaciously inferred that a policy which aimed waywardly at Sebastopol, and neglected to keep a iiold over any broad part of the province in which Sebastopol stood, might lead to what afterwards happened — that is, to want in the midst of abundance — to the want of hay and forage-corn which, though plentiful in the country generally, were renounced, as it were, by the Allies when they determined to rest content with Balaclava and the barren Chersonese. In his letter of the 22d September 1854 he imparted this apprehension to the Treasury. Note 3. — I have before me a curious correspondence on this subject between two of the Westminster offices, from which it