Meantime the very large demand for officers, and the insatiable demand for capable officers, has brought the experienced and capable common man into the case and is in a fair way to discredit gentility as a necessary qualification of field officers.
But the same process of discredit and elimination is also extending to the responsible officials who have the administration of things in hand.
Indeed, the course of vulgarisation among the responsible officials has now been under way for some appreciable time and with very perceptible effect, and the rate of displacement appears to be gathering velocity with every month that passes.

Here, as in the field operations, it also appears that gentlemanly methods, standards, preconceptions, and knowledge of men and things, is no longer to the purpose.

Here, too, it is increasingly evident that this is not a gentlemen's war.

And the traditional qualifications that have sufficed in the past, at least to the extent of enabling the British management to "muddle through," as they are proudly in the habit of saying,--these qualifications are of slight account in this technological conjuncture of the nation's fortunes.

It would perhaps be an under-statement to say that these gentlemanly qualifications are no longer of any account, for the purpose immediately in hand, and it would doubtless not do to say that they are wholly and unreservedly disserviceable as things run today; but captious critics might find at least a precarious footing of argument on such a proposition.
Through the course of the nineteenth century the British government had progressively been taking on the complexion of a "gentlemen's agreement;" a government by gentlemen, for gentlemen, and of gentlemen, too, beyond what could well be alleged in any other known instance, though never wholly so.