IN common with all right-minded persons, we are glad to perceive that the attention of the public and of the government, seems at length to be directed in earnest towards the introduction into the army of an improved system of moral and intellectual discipline. That the army well deserves this care for its best interests, nobody who is conversant with the events of the last half century can doubt. Not to speak of the important service performed by our troops during the perilous season when England was at war with the most powerful nations in the world; not to revert to their sufferings in the Netherlands under the late Duke of York; their endurance in Holland; their valour in Egypt; their patience amid the pestilential swamps of St. Domingo, and under the burning suns of the far East; not to dwell too much upon their triumphs in the Peninsula, their losses in America, and the crowning glories of Waterloo, whereby peace was purchased for Europe, which has continued unbroken more than thirty years,-we have only to consider the amount and nature of the duties which at this moment the country imposes upon its army, and we shall be convinced at once that, let us deal with our soldiers as generously as we may, we cannot come up to their deservings, far less go beyond them.

In the history of the world there has never been heard of an armed force out of which the nation that kept it together took so much. We really seem to believe as Nelson professed to believe before us-that one Englishman is worth three men of any other nation, not in the battlefield exclusively, as was his view of the case, but in the still more harassing struggle which all soldiers, more or less sustain against exposure to climate, watching, and strong temptation. So far from assenting to the opinions of the Continentals concerning us, that "we are not a military nation" we seem to be of opinion, that there is a spirit so essentially military inherent in every man from within the compass of the three kingdoms, that whatever you

set him to in the order of a soldier's calling and duties, he will accomplish it,-ay, and accomplish well, without any previous training. Con sider how our battalions are dissipated and scattered at home, and harassed by severe colonial duty. It is the rarest thing in the world to find, except at one or two points, as much as a whole regiment of infantry together, either in Great Britain or Ireland; and taking into account their progresses from colony to colony, perhaps there is not a soldier in the British army that does not spend a full tenth part of the period of his service on board of ship. And as to service in the colonies, very many, indeed almost all of which, try the constitutions of Englishmen severelyit absorbs on the most moderate computation something more than threefourths of the soldier's time under arms; if he be sent to India or New South Wales early in his career, it probably absorbs the whole. For the empire of the Queen of England is at once the most extensive and the most populous that ever existed among men; and she holds it against foreign enemies, and preserves peace among its heterogeneous inhabitants by means of an army scarcely more numerous than Austria employs to secure the allegiance of her Italian and Hungarian provinces.

There is no boon which this country has to bestow, but that the army by the extent and importance of its services has earned it. For the sake of the soldiers themselves, therefore, we heartily rejoice that there appears to be some prospect of getting a solid education introduced into the regiments generally, and the barracks in which the men are stationed rendered fit for rational beings to occupy. These, things, when they are accomplished, will indeed contribute to the soldier's respectability as well as to his comforts. They will cause him to respect himself. They will create in him tastes for higher pleasures than those which spring out of mere animal gratifications. They will save him from many an act of folly, and its necessary result of suffering; and, above all, they will provide for h

resources against the time when his country shall have dispensed with his services, and restored him, an old, and perhaps, a broken-down man, to the town or village whence he was taken. They will fit him, likewise, for such situations as it may be in the contemplation of the government to reserve for him: namely, for one of the inferior offices in the customs, or in the excise, or in the police, or about the postoffice. And they will thereby retain him, possibly during some of the best years of his life, available still in case of invasion from abroad, or riot or disturbance at home. Of far more importance to him therefore are they, than even good-conduct stripes, and the increase of pay that accompanies them. For uneducated men are not rendered either the more happy or the more virtuous by the acquisition of superabundant wealth. On the contrary, as soon as you put the unlettered soldier in possession of a larger amount of money than may be required for his subsistence, you throw additional temptations to profligacy in his way. He has no idea of enjoyment beyond that which may be found in the public-house, or the canteen, or the society of loose women; and the consequence is, that he is sure, sooner or later, to be disgraced, or possibly to forfeit not his additional pay alone, but all claim to a pension.

It would be presumptuous in us, after the full and able discussion which this part of the subject has received both in the Quarterly Review and in the Times, to advert to it except shortly. Yet it does appear that, in spite of the acumen which belongs to our contemporaries, they have not noticed certain parts collateral, perhaps, to the great question, but scarcely on that account less important than the question itself. Of these, one which will occur immediately to the more reflective of our readers is this, that God has not given to England the dominion over so many of the fairest portions of the earth for the mere aggrandisement, in an economical point of view, of the ruling power. We are masters of India, in order that through us the abominations of heathenism may be rooted out. We are lords of Canada and of the islands of the

Caribbean seas, in order that in each of these there may spring up a race of civilised, moral, and religious people. The Polynesian group has come, or is coming into our exclusive possession, to the end that there, also, the seeds of Christianity and of good government may be sown. And in China the crust which had heretofore resisted all pressure from without is broken. Now by what class of person is the intercourse which we establish with the heathen begun? And who are they that, in very many instances, become settlers in the bush and on the prairie? In both cases soldiers are our instruments;men who have served, or are still serving, in the ranks, who meet the heathen in battle and overthrow them, and, taking military possession of their country, give to them their first and most enduring impression of what the Christian's religion is,— who win them to adopt our manners by the grace and purity that adorn their own, or more and more confirm them in the usages of their fathers by the disgust with which they look upon the white man's excesses. What advantages does not the soldier possess for good if he himself only know what good is, and take pleasure in the performance of it? What an incalculable amount of evil does he not scatter round him, if the people whom he has defeated learn to esteem him, in all things, except in valour, immeasurably their inferiors!

That the powerful effect for moral good or moral evil of the intercourse, be it more or less intimate, which our troops establish with the natives of heathen countries, should have been heretofore overlooked or disregarded by those in high military authority, by no means surprises us. Commanders-in-chief, as well as adjutant and quartermaster generals, naturally assume that they have done their part so soon as they shall have converted some thousands of country bumpkins into smart, active, and well set-up-soldiers. They consider that for this, and only for this, the crown grants them their commissions and the country pays them. They may be anxious, to a certain extent, about the health, and what they consider to be the bodily comforts of the troops, because their

object is to keep the army effective, which it cannot be unless the men be robust, as well as skilful in the use of their weapons and steady on parade. But their anxiety on these heads is far less lively than in regard to the clothing and drill of the men; for they have a medical department to look to, of which it were unfair not to acknowledge that, in point of zeal and intelligence, there is nothing like it attached to any other army in the world. Hence, while they catch at new inventions, such as detonating muskets, and work up old systems of manœuvre till they seem worthy to be called new, they take no thought, or next to none, of the men's quarters, or conveniences for cleanliness, and scout the idea of every thing like an approach to refinement among them. As to the religious opinions of the blackguards, or their moral code,

so long as they keep clear of the articles of war, to these things they pay no regard at all, and would, we suspect, pronounce to be insane, or at least enthusiastic, any human being who should hint that the one or the other deserved attention. Now, we may regret this, but we do not at all wonder at it. Commanders-in-chief, and adjutant and quartermaster generals are seldom very young men; they have spent the whole of their days, morcover, in the service, entering it in boyhood with minds marvellously little cultivated, and receiving from day to day only impressions of a particular cast and character. Sixty or seventy years old, or possibly more, they began their professional career at a time when ministers of the crown were not ashamed to declare in parliament that the greatest scoundrels made the best soldiers. They may, or may not, have imbibed this notion; but if they did not imbibe it to the full, they unquestionably believed at the moment perhaps believe still- that morality and soldiership have no necessary connexion one with the other. How often have we heard it asserted, by officers of standing and experience, that "you don't want very good men' in the ranks! The sort of fellows to do the work are, according to this theory dare-devil scamps; that is to say, men who part with their own lives, or the lives of others, at a pin's value -who care neither for God nor man,

except for their own officers and their own regiments-who will plunder and get drunk as often as there is chance of doing so with impunity,swear, bluster, seek for sweethearts wherever they go, and be up, according to a well-understood phrase, to any thing. Of course, gentlemen who express this opinion speak from their experience of the past. They look back upon great battles fought and won by the materials which they are commending; and forgetting that such materials were moulded and kept in shape by a discipline so iron that it never can be resorted to again, they mistake for a natural advantage that which was rendered not positively disadvantageous only through an extent of pressure which it is no longer in their power to apply. Of course, too, they call to mind that the duredevils were generally clean upon parade, and that they took their corporal punishment, however severe, without flinching. What a hideous subject is that on which we have just touched! Who can bear to think of a period in the military history of his country, when regularly, as each fresh morning occurred, the troops were paraded for punishment, and men and officers stood to witness the humiliating spectacle of the cato'-nine-tails? However, we must not dwell upon customs which are happily obsolete, or next to obsolete, in the service. It is enough to have adverted to them, with the single view of shewing, that if times be changed as regards the manner and extent of punishing crime in the army, it were well that some means be invented and applied for the purpose of hindering the commission of crime -a matter which is in truth more important than punishment a thousand-fold

It was the necessary consequence of opinions and practices such as we have just adverted to, that soldiers should be regarded, both by their officers and by the public, as mere machines. Creatures on whom it was never thought worth while to work by moral influences could not, indeed, be accounted any better than machines. We drilled and trained our troops, fifty years ago, just as we drilled and trained our pointers-with the lash. Sergeants, and even porals, always carried canes

they applied to the hands, shoulders, or other offending limbs of the recruit, on the same principle that guided the gamekeeper in his correction of the faults of the pointer-puppy. If the recruit had the hardihood to remonstrate, or the temerity to wince, he was forthwith reported to the adjutant; and some charge of insubordination being got up against him, the chances were that he was flogged. In like manner, when the parade was formed-for which, by the by, the preparations were terrible, because we speak of days when the men had their hair dressed and powdered regularly, and were often obliged to sleep in a sitting posture half the night, in order to keep themselves in regulationorder no man, however irreproachable his moral conduct, could assure himself against being dragged out of his place, tried by a drum-head courtmartial, and punished. A curl out of its proper set, a queue somewhat awry, never failed to earn for the wearer a volley of abuse. A button less bright than silver, or a stain upon a belt, was usually atoned for by a flogging. These were, indeed, the days of martinetship with a vengeance; when he was accounted the smartest officer whose eye was the most ready to detect a trifling irregularity of dress, whose mouth was full of cursing on the least important occasions,and his anger appeased only by the bodily suffering of the wretch who might have stirred it. No wonder that the notion of educating the soldier should have been scouted then, or that any hole was considered good enough to thrust him into. No wonder that "officers of experience," who began their professional life when such practices were in fashion, should still regard the soldier as a machine, and desire to have him treated accordingly.

It may savour of the paradox-yet we believe the sentiment to be justthat the very last persons who deserve to be consulted, in regard to substantial reforms in any of the great institutions of this country, are those who, in their own persons, constitute a portion of the moving principle, so to speak, in such institutions. Men seldom attain to what is called influence in their professions, or offices, or occupations, whatever these may be, till they have arrived at the verge, at least, of old age; men

seldom arrive at the verge of old age, as members of a profession, or of a public body of any sort, without having their minds overlaid by an impenetrable crust of prejudice, and their reason itself clouded and obscured through the growth of settled habits both of thinking and of acting. Take the Church-as we are accustomed to use that term, most improperly restricting it to signify the bishops and clergy-does any sane man believe that they are the best judges in regard to arrangements that may be needed if we seek to give the greatest efficiency to the ministrations of their order among the people? What ecclesiastic would have originated-what ecclesiastic did not in his heart condemn the measures which were begun by Sir Robert Peel in 1835 and are still in progress? The clergy looked ten years ago only to what they described as the respectability of their own order; they argued in defence of superabundant cathedral offices, of pluralities, commendams, and Lord knows all what, because, forsooth, the chance of getting a good slice out of the loaves and fishes, lured young men of high birth and first-rate talents into the ministry. They entirely overlooked the fact, that while these continued, hundreds of thousands of the people were famishing for want of spiritual food, and hundreds, if not thousands, of hard-working Clergymen, starving upon benefices, which brought them in forty pounds a-year, or eighty, or possibly a hundred. Sir Robert Peel, a layman, took a different view of the subject; being supported by Parliament, he literally forced upon the Church reforms, of which all among the clergy, except the few who have got beyond the age when men discover that they may, perhaps, be mistaken, now acknowledge the merits. Take, in like manner, any of the public offices--the Colonial Office, or the Home Office, or the Ordnance, which, as we are writing upon military subjects, seems more in point than either. Are our readers aware of the manner in which business is conducted there? Do they know the cause of those delays and procrastinations of which all complain? And is any man, woman, or child, so simple as to expect that changes for

the better will begin spontaneously in Pall-Mall? No, verily. It is our conscientious belief, that at the Ordnance Office matters are managed exactly as they used to be in the days of Queen Elizabeth, and we are further convinced that they will continue to be so managed, until some one entirely unconnected with that most cumbrous of all cumbrous institutions shall force the light of day into the recesses of its apartments, and compel changes such as shall much conduce to the advancement of the public service, without giving to individuals more inconvenience than uniformly attends upon a change of habits somewhat late in life.

The same principle which operates against change in the Church and in a public office, offers a steady opposition to change in the details of the management in the army. Officers high in rank, whether actively employed or not, remember that the existing system did very well in their day, and believe that it may do very well still. Officers in public employment have got into a jog-trot routine, and not being alarmed by mutinies any where, or the threat of mutiny, they persuade themselves that any deviation from established usage must be for evil. Who has forgotten the resistance that was offered to the diminution of power in regimental courts-martial to award corporal punishment to any great amount. Do away with flogging! Take away the beardless ensign's and lieutenant's authority to award three hundred or five hundred lashes to men old enough to be their fathers, and scarred with half-a-dozen honourable wounds! You are undermining the discipline of the army; you will never be able to manage your regiments again, and had better disband them at once." Was not this language held openly-in every barrack, in the clubs, before committees of the House of Commons, where private coteries met, and in the rooms of high functionaries at the Horse Guards. Beyond these military circles, however, it was never heard, and the civilians having taken the notion up, that corporal punishment degrades and brutalises the subject of it, pressed the point of its virtual abolition till they prevailed. And what do we find? That the

army is just as tractable as it ever was; that the barrack cell and the provost prison have been-at least in England-as effective in exciting fear as the lash; and that our regiments continue to be composed of fine hearty young fellows, who march, fire, and fight as the fathers used to do, and submit, without a murmur, to a discipline which they feel to be necessary, even when they personally suffer for it. And the very persons who were the loudest to condemn the change of system which has brought about these results, are now driven to acknowledge that they were mistaken.

We do not pretend to know—we shall not so much as venture to guess —with whom the notion of educating the soldier has originated. If the idea came from the Horse Guards, then must we fairly admit, that for once our theory of reform in great institutions has failed us. If, on the other hand, high military authorities resist it, we shall say no more than that the issue is precisely such as might be expected; and that to be angry with such authorities, or to charge them with intentional wrong to the soldier, would be ridiculous. They are doing, in 1846, precisely what the great body of the clergy did in 1835, and what the clerks and other functionaries in the public offices under the crown will do as soon as there shall arise some individual bold enough to attack their manner of doing business and expose it. They are old men, who have spent long lives in a particular profession, and look no farther than to the manner in which, as parts of a complicated machine, the members of their profession perform certain prescribed duties. They cannot see so far as the day when the soldier shall claim his discharge. They never stop to ask how he is to get on without a trade, without the smallest spark of intelligence; ignorant of the common accomplishments of reading and writing, after the country shall have used him up and cast him aside. They do not consider nor, perhaps, care what the effect of his intercourse with the Hindoo and Chinese is to be; whether he shall lead the heathen to inquire respectfully into the doctrines of a religion which renders its votaries sober, chaste, honest, and