APPENDIX. 397 Raglan lived, to govern the conduct of all concerned, and giving authoritative inception to those official relations between the Secretary of State and the General which lasted on uninterrupt- edly from the April of 1854 to the June of the following year. Both in terms and in fact, the document transferred Lord Raglan from the guidance of the Queen and her military officers to that of ' Her Majesty's Ministers ; ' so that, if we wished to abstain from prejudging the question of nomenclature, we might appropriately call this last missive the ' Letter of Transfer. ' The late Lord Hardinge, however, was himself the writer of this Letter, was the chief of the office — the Horse Guards — from which it had issued, and before he went down to lay his testimony before the Committee of the House of Commons, he had specially ]5repared himself for the task of elucidating tlie subject. Speak- ing to the Committee with all these presumptions in favour of his accuracy, he gave to this letter of transfer the name of ' Letter of ' Sen'ice.' Still, those clerks in the now submerged ' War Office ' to whom the Edinbui'gli critic so fondly trusted for guidance felt very sure that the document of the 1st of April was one rightly called a ' Letter of Service, ' and I daresay they also insisted — thus mis- leading the excited Reviewer — that no other document under heaven could be entitled to the same appellation. As regards that last part of their contention, they of course are overwhelmingly met by the autlioritative statement of Lord Har- dinge, who deliberately gave the same name to another and far more imjiortant paper which had issued under his own hand from that Royal Office of which he himself was the chief ; but, on the other hand, it seems to me that the first part of the theory put forward by the now submerged clerks is left nndestroyed by Lord Hardinge's testimony, and may be not only maintained but sup- ported by an appeal to that usage which (if not contravening authority) must, after all, have great weight. It would seem that by generals who have held commands in the field these two documents — the ' Field Establishment Letter ' and the ' Letter of Transfer ' — have been constantly spoken of coupled, and under a plural title made common to both ; so that, if, for example, you ask a newly appointed chief how soon he will be ready to go and take up his command, he will probably say in his answer (if so the fact be) that he has received his ' Letters of
- Service,' thus giving to both of the documents the same cogno-
men ; whilst, if asked to distinguish between them by giving to each a separate name, he, so far as I learn, does not prove to have any terms ready with which to meet the demand. Considering that the two documents, though so widely different, were both of them ancillary to the same business, and that they, both of them, recited the appointment of the new Commander to a ' particular
