is only possible under a state of discipline which, to make a soldier, unmakes a man by depriving him of all that ennobles his species. Under no other than military training, and in no other than the military class, would the atrocities have been possible. which used to be perpetrated in the barrack riding-school, in the old flogging days. Officers and privates needed the debasing influence of discipline to enable them to look on as patient spectators at the sufferings of a helpless comrade tortured by the cat-o'-nine tails. Sir C. Napier said that as a subaltern he "frequently saw 600, 700, 800, 900, and 1,000 lashes sentenced by regimental courts-martial and generally every lash inflicted;" a feeling of horror would run through the ranks at the first blows and some recruits would faint, but that was all.' Had they been men and not soldiers, they would not have stood such iniquities. A typical instance of this martial justice or law (to employ the conventional profanation of those words) was that of a sergeant who in 1792 was sentenced to 1,000 lashes for having enlisted two drummers for the East Indian Company whom he knew to belong already to the Footguards; but the classical description of an English flogging will always be Somerville's account of its infliction upon himself in his "Autobiography of a Working Man.” 2 There you may read how the regiment was drawn up four-deep inside the riding-school; how the officers (men of gentle birth and breeding) stood within the lines of the men; how the basin of water and towels were ready prepared in case the victim should faint; how the hands and feet of the latter were fastened to a ladder by a rope; and how the regimental sergeant-major stood with book and pencil coolly counting each stroke as it was delivered with slow and deliberate torture till the full complement of a hundred lashes had been inflicted. The mere reading of it even now is enough to make the blood boil, but that men, brave and freeborn, should have stood by in their hundreds and seen the actual reality without stirring, proves how utterly all human feeling is eradicable by discipline, and how sure is the training it supplies in disregard for all the claims of humanity.

Happily, floggings in the English army now count among the curiosities of military discipline, like the wooden horse or the thumbscrew; but the striking thing is that the discipline, in the sense of the good conduct of the army in the field, was never worse than in the days when 1,000 lashes were common sentences. It was precisely when courts-martial had the legal power to exercise such tyranny that the Duke of Wellington complained to Lord Castlereagh that the law was not strong enough to maintain discipline in an army 'Military Law, 163.

2 285, 290.

upon actual service. Speaking of the army in the Peninsula he says: "It is impossible to describe to you the irregularities and outrages committed by the troops; . . . there is not an outrage of any description which has not been committed on a people who have received us as friends by soldiers who never yet for one moment suffered the slightest want or the smallest privation. . . . We are an excellent army on parade, an excellent one to fight, but we are worse than an enemy in a country." And again a few months later: "I really believe that more plunder and outrage have been committed by this army than by any other that was ever in the field." In the general order of May 19, 1809, are these words: "The officers of companies must attend to the men in their quarters as well as on the march, or the army will soon be no better than a banditti.” 2

Whence it is fair to infer that severity of discipline has no necessary connection with the good behaviour or easy control of troops in the field, such discipline under the Iron Duke himself having been conspicuous for so lamentable a failure. The real fact is, that troops are difficult to manage just in proportion to the rigour, the monotony, and the dulness of the discipline imposed upon them in time of peace; the rebound corresponding to the compression, by a moral law that seems to follow the physical one. This fact is nowhere better noticed than in Lord Wolseley's narrative of the China war of 1860, where he says, in allusion to the general love of pillage and destruction characterising soldiers: "The wild moments of enjoyment passed in the pillage of a place live long in a soldier's memory. Such a time forms so marked a contrast with the ordinary routine of existence passed under the tight hand of discipline that it becomes a remarkable event in life and is remembered accordingly." 3

The experience of the Peninsular war proves how slender is the link between a well-drilled and a well-disciplined army. The best disciplined army is the one which conducts itself with least excess in the field and is least demoralised by victory. It is the hour of victory that is the great test of the value of military regulations; and so well aware of this was the best disciplined state of antiquity that the soldiers of Sparta desisted from pursuit as soon as victory was assured to them, partly because it was deemed ungenerous to destroy those who could make no further resistance (a sentiment absolutely wanting from the boasted chivalry of Christian warfare), and partly that the enemy might be tempted to prefer flight to resistance. It is a reproach to modern generalship that it has been powerless to restrain 1 Despatches, iii. 302, June 17, 1809.

* Compare also Despatches, iv. 457 ; v. 583, 704, 5.

3 China War, 225.

such excesses as those which have made the successful storming of cities rather a disgrace than an honour to those who have won them. The only way to check them is to make the officers responsible for what occurs, as might be done, for instance, by punishing a general capitally for storming a city with forces so badly disciplined as to nullify the advantages of success. An English military writer, speaking of the storming of Ismail and Praga by the Russians under Suwarrow, says truly that "posterity will hold the fame and honour of the commander responsible for the life of every human being sacrificed by disciplined armies beyond the fair verge of battle;" but it is idle to speak as if only Russian armies were guilty of such excesses, or to say that nothing but the prospect of them could tempt the Russian soldier to mount the breach or the scaling-ladder. The Russian soldier in history yields not one whit to the English or French in bravery, nor is there a grain of difference between the Russian storming of Ismail and Praga and the English storming of Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz, or San Sebastian, that tarnished the lustre of the British arms in the famous Peninsular war.

And should we be tempted to think that successes like those associated with the names of those places may be so important in war as to outweigh all other considerations, we must also not forget that the permanent military character of nations, for humanity or the reverse, counts for more in the long run of a people's history than any advantage that can possibly be gained in a single campaign.

Enough has, perhaps, been said of the unpopularity of military service, and of the obvious causes thereof, to make it credible that, had the system of conscription never been resorted to in Europe, and the principle of voluntary enlistment remained intact and universal, the difficulty of procuring the human fighting material in sufficient quantities would in course of time have rendered warfare impossible. As other industries than mere fighting have won their way in the world, the difficulty of hiring recruits to sell their lives to their country has kept even pace with the facility of obtaining livelihoods in more regular and more lucrative as well as in less miserable avocations. In the fourteenth century soldiers were very highly paid compared with other classes, and the humblest private received a daily wage equivalent to that of a skilled mechanic; but the historical process has so far reversed matters that now the pay of the meanest mechanic would compare favourably with that of all the fighting grades lower than the commissioned and warrant ranks. Consequently, every attempt to make the service popular has as yet been futile, no ame

1 Scott's British Army, ii. 411.

lioration of it enabling it to compete with pacific occupations. The private's pay was raised from sixpence to a shilling during the wars of the French Revolution; and before that it was found necessary, about the time of the war with the American colonies, to bribe men to enlist by the system (since abolished) of giving bounties at the time of enlistment. Previous to the introduction of the bounty system, a guinea to provide the recruit with necessaries and a crown wherewith to drink the king's health was all that was given upon enlistment, the service itself (with the chances of loot and the allied pleasures) having been bounty enough.2 Even the system of bounties proved attractive only to boys; for as the English statesman said, whose name is honourably associated with the first change in our system from enlistment for life to enlistment for a limited period, "men grown up with all the grossness and ignorance and consequent want of consideration incident to the lower classes" were too wary to accept the offers of the recruiting department.3

The shortening of the term of service in 1806 and subsequently the increase of pay, the mitigation of punishments, must all be understood as attempts to render the military life more attractive and more capable of competing with other trades; but that they have all signally failed is proved by the chronic and ever-increasing difficulty of decoying recruits. The little pamphlet, published by authority and distributed gratis at every post-office in the kingdom, showing forth "the Advantages of the Army" in their rosiest colours, cannot counteract the influence of the oral evidence of men, who, after a short period of service, are dispersed to all corners of the country, with their tales of military misery to tell, confirming and propagating that popular theory of a soldier's life which sees in it a sort of earthly purgatory for faults of character acquired in youth, a calling only to be adopted by those whose antecedents render industry distasteful to them, and unfit them for more useful pursuits.

The same difficulty of recruiting was felt in France and Germany in the last century, when voluntary enlistment was still the rule. In that curious old military book, Fleming's Volkommene Teutsche Soldat, is a picture of the recruiting officer, followed by trumpeters and drummers, parading the streets, and shaking a hat full of silver coins. near a table spread with the additional temptations of wine and beer. But it soon became necessary to supplement this system by coercive methods; and when the habitual neglect of the wounded

'Wellington's Despatches, v. 705.

2 See Windham's Speech in the House of Commons. Ap. 3, 1806.

Ibid.

4 P. 122.

and the great number of needless wars made it difficult or impossible to fill up the ranks with fresh recruits, the German authorities resorted to a regular system of kidnapping, taking men as they could get them from their ploughs, their churches, or even from their very beds.

In France, too, Louis XIV. had to resort to force for filling his ranks in the war of the Spanish succession; although the system of recruiting remained nominally voluntary till very much later. The total cost of a French recruit amounted to ninety-two livres ; but the length of his service, though it was changed from time to time from periods varying from three to eight years, never exceeded the latter limit, nor came to be for life as it did practically in England.

The experience of other countries proves, therefore, that England will sooner or later adopt the principle of conscription or cease to waste blood and money in Continental quarrels. The conscription will be for her the only possible way of obtaining an army at all, or one at all commensurate with those of her possible European rivals. And the conscription, whether under a free government or not, means a tyranny compared to which the tyrannies of the Tudors or Stuarts were as a yoke of silk to a yoke of iron. It would matter little that it should lead to or involve a political despotism, for the greater despotism would ever be the military one, crushing out all individuality, moral liberty, and independence, and consigning to the souldestroying routine of petty military details all the talent, taste, knowledge, and wealth of our country, which have hitherto given it a distinctive character in history, and a foremost place among the nations of the earth.

In the year 1702 a woman served as a captain in the French army with such signal bravery that she was rewarded with the Order of St. Louis. Nor was this the only result; for the episode roused a serious debate in the world, whether, or not, military service might be expected of, or exacted from, the female sex generally. Why then should the conscription be confined to one half only of a population, in the face of so many historical instances of women who have shown pre-eminent, or at least average, military capacity? And if military service is so ennobling and excellent a thing, as it is said to be, for the male population of a country, why not also for the female? Or as we may be sure that it would be to the last degree debasing for the latter half of the community, may we not suspect that the reasoning is altogether sophistical which claims other effects as the consequence of its operation on the stronger sex?

1 Fleming, 109.