Few things in private conversation are more winning than lack of discretion. I cannot pretend that Lord Wolseley was a cautious speaker, and I think his company would have been much less entertaining than it was if he had minced his words or hedged his opinions. He had spent twenty years or more of his life in a prodigious enterprise, no less than the entire remodelling of the British Army. He had seen with Napoleonic clearness what sweeping reforms were needed, and he had not felt the smallest hesitation in setting about their introduction. But he had originally been quite alone in this perilous enterprise. Hercules had come to the cattle-yard of Augeas and had found it clogged with the mire of generations. He set about turning the course of Alpheus and Peneus, rivers of Whitehall, and he sent their waters rushing through the stable. With his besom he began to scrub the refuse out of every corner. But the old-fashioned stablemen were not pleased to be disturbed, and Augeas, in consternation, refused to give Hercules his reward. Thereupon there arose loud and lasting clamours, in the midst of which the work, frustrated as far as mediocrity found possible, went forward steadily, but in a wind of exasperation. There was rage on both sides, recrimination, injury; and even the monarch of Elis was not disengaged from the struggle. If these things are an allegory, it is a very transparent one, and it need not be translated. It suffices to say that he would have little insight into human character who should express surprise at any vehemence of expression, with regard to those who opposed his cleansing activities, which the Nemean hero might give way to in private conversation. He was tired with fighting those of his own household and he was sick from the stupidity of persons clothed with brief authority.
If, however, Lord Wolseley expended the treasures of what could at call be a very lively vocabulary on the men who had hindered his life's work, nothing could exceed his loyal memory of the few who had found courage to support him. Among the latter, Mr. Cardwell and Lord Northbrook stood pre-eminent, particularly the former, of whom I remember many tributes of the warmest appreciation. I have often heard Wolseley say that he came back from the Crimea with a sense of horror at all the shortcomings of our military system, and that his criticisms met with none but the most languid attention except from Cardwell. It was a highly fortunate circumstance that these two came together, for Cardwell at home in England had come to the same conclusions as Wolseley had in the four quarters of the globe. He was able, as Secretary for War from 1868 to 1874, to put into practical shape the ideas which Wolseley had, by his high gift of imagination, seen in the field itself to be necessary. Wolseley believed that, but for Cardwell's unflinching support, his enemies would have contrived to have him honourably deported to some command at the Antipodes where his tiresome brain would have ceased to worry the War Office. The fiercest of the fight gathered about the year 1872, when "the old school" would hardly believe that anyone calling himself a gentleman could make himself so intolerably objectionable as did this horrible Sir Garnet Wolseley. At this time Cardwell, in the face of every species of intrigue and resistance, shielded his assistant from his opponents. Later on he helped him to collect around him the ablest soldiers of promise on whom the army of the future depended. I never heard Wolseley speak of anyone with so much regret as of Cardwell, cut off, by failing health, in the midst of his labours.