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"What has all this to do with the soldier? Armies were embodied, fed, encamped, and went forth to battle thousands of years before the invention of the railway and the spinning-jenny." True enough-but it is equally true that late times have seen as great a change in the domestic position strictly the domestic position-of the soldier, as the factory system has created on the position of the spinner and weaver, or the railway system on that of the traveller. There is, in fact, no one more help lessly dependent on the conduct and the misconduct of others than the soldier-no one for whom, in his domestic position, external protection is

more necessary.

The barrack is an institution comparatively late among ourselves, and comparatively unknown to the rest of the world. The fortresses of the most extensively fortified countries in Europe seldom contain a large proportion of their armies the bulk of the troops must be dispersed among the civilian community. The fortresses in this country have always been a trifle-the largest of them, so far as we understand, stands upon a small tongue of land stretching into the Moray Firth, a few miles from Inverness. Under the old commissions of array, the country gentry had to find the troops of their own county in clothing, provisions, and quarters, and there were certain reciprocal privileges of quartering when they passed into other counties, fruitful in disputes, which were generally settled, so far as the immediate parties were concerned, by the soldier taking what he found and wanted, and leaving the ultimate incidence of the cost to be settled by any other powers-higher or lower. Unfortunately the person who suffered under the quartering was generally an enemy, or esteemed to be so, and thus there was no necessity for any adjustment of accounts. It was in civil war only that embodied troops were kept at home by our ancestors. For the defence of the country they trusted to a sudden levy, and when an army was raised for foreign conflict, it went immediately abroad, and was disbanded when it

returned. The obligation of quartering the few soldiers kept at home was a matter of loud and continuous complaint from time to time. Doubtless, under such a fortuitous arrangement, the trooper or the pikeman was often ill enough off; but on other occasions, and especially in unsettled times, the extent to which he helped himself, when there was aught to be helped from, partook of the character of pillage. So inveterate had the practice of appropriation be come, that in the '45 we find old Hawley, a thoroughly trained soldier, who was not likely to have done anything far astray from the military ideas of his age, accused by an old lady of Aberdeen, loyal to the Government, of carrying off all her china and books, her bedding and table-linen, her repeating-clock, "which stood by the bed in which he lay every night," along with "twelve teaspoons, strainer, and tongs, and the japanned board on which the chocolate and coffee cups stood." *

When a standing army, embodied under the annual Mutiny Act, came to be a national institution, the quartering system would never have been tolerated, and the barrack system was a necessary substitute. Of the old arrangement, we have just a faint memorial in a trifling billetingtax, which excites great wrath wherever it happens accidentally to rest. It is a pecuniary alternative for the actual billeting, which all discreet persons pay; but instances are on record where a negligent householder has been appalled by the vision of three red-coats descending the area stairs in a business-like fashion, as if they were going home-though we have generally heard the conclusion of such an incident to be, that "the fellows behaved very well indeed," and for a reasonable sum took themselves off to the tavern at the corner. We question if there is any other well-armed country in Europe where the billeting system is not in full force. In France at the present day, in the remotest country-house or hamlet, at any hour, by day or night, the soldier on duty may appear and demand admission-a dreaded,

* Memoirs of the Rebellion of 1745, p. 212.

but from necessity, an ostensibly welcomed guest. Wherever this old practice is continued, as the citizen lives, so does the soldier-perhaps the latter fares rather above the average of the householder at large. The conscription system has its influence in making the thing work easily—it is your destiny to carry arms and live with me to-day-it may be mine to carry arms and live with you to-morrow: the quartered soldier is but one of a large and rather miscellaneous circle of persons, connected by a link which causes them from time to time for tuitously to throw themselves on each other's hospitality. The condition of the whole community where this practice holds may be a very low one, but it is clear that in it we shall not find the ordinary citizen-convict included-well housed and well fed, with occasional wholesome variations of diet, while the soldier lives in quarters destitute of any means of purification, breathes foul air, and eats the same dinner for twenty successive years. The case, therefore, of the billeted soldier, among a community practically acquainted with the system of quartering, does not call forth that amount of sedulous care and attention-of expense, as it may be necessary for the barracked soldier's protection.

The whole question is, in fact, in a great measure, a matter of money— inade so by the proud fastidiousness of this rich country. None of the stains of war are to touch us-none of its clamours to reach our ears. Away thousands of miles must roll the tide of battle; neither the appalling roar of the conflict itself, nor the confused din of misery and agony that follows it, must disturb the dignified serenity of our island retreat. Relations and dear friends perhaps feel the heart throb when fresh telegraphic news are announced, or suffer the sickening agony of hope deferred, in vain expectations; the nation exults in a victory, or is maddened if there is anything like a check on the onward career of our victorious troops. Some great leader is idolised for the day, and gets the thanks of Parliament as an august tribute to his merits. Young heroes are popular in ball-rooms, and even a private or

non-commissioned, with brown features, bushy beard, and a collection of pewter decorations, gets an audience of his old companions at the corner of a street, or a passing glance of admiration from some members of "the upper classes." But the national jealousy of anything like military supremacy comes soon, and freezes the short enthusiasm.

The national jealousy is right, so far as it strikes at all attempts to give internal political power to the mili tary institutions. But there are two things which the nation owes to the soldier. Give him first his fame and honours in due and permanent measure. Since, also, our wealth-born fastidiousness will not tolerate the disagreeables of war and soldier life to appear among us, surely we ought to pay the cost of that fastidiousness out of that wealth which generates it. Our requisitions on the soldier's forbearance are not even limited to what may affect ourselves. We worthily desire to mitigate the hardships of war all over the world-among our enemies even, as well as among all neutral nations. To this end the object which war is so naturally apt to assumethe object of private plunder-has been sternly put down. The Duke of Wellington's great campaign in the Peninsula was a long resolute practical lesson against it on land; the abandonment of letters-of-marque was the abolition of its last offensive form at sea. Our policy now is the true policy of war to strike at the heart, where the enemy may be paralysed and his power broken, with the least injury to life and property. This, however, is not the method of rewarding and enriching the soldier after old custom. Descents on unarmed seaports, after the fashion of our sea-king ancestors -marauding marches far away from the chief fortresses, among villages, country mansions, and rich religious houses-these are the forms of war which enrich the soldier with plunder, as the troops of Wallenstein and of Soult were enriched. Most worthily have we striven to suppress this curse

and with a success crossed only by few exceptions. But again, why should the soldier be compelled to pay for our virtue-why not put our

hand in our pockets and give him compensation, as we give it to some bloated jobber from whom we take an office where he is useless, and worse? Let us not be misunderstood in the free use of a simile. It is not strictly compensation that we would ask for the soldier, for though he has his own faults, mercenary selfishness is not among them. But since we demand that he should conduct himself with propriety and decorum, should be sedulously amenable to military discipline, and at the same time carefully observant not only of the rights, but of the tastes and prejudices of civilians-that he should be as kind, generous, and disinterested as he is brave that he should ever suppress in himself the natural disposition to covet other men's goods, for which he has so many temptations-that he should be moderate in the assertion of his own rights, and ever ready to admit and to protect those of other people-if all these demands on imperfect human nature are to be concentrated upon him, then certainly we ought to treat him, not only with fairness, but with generosity and kindness, and, even for our own sakes, should do whatever can be done to raise his condition, remove temptation, and make the practice of the many virtues demanded of him not too difficult. We are the very nation on whom falls, before all the world, the function of raising the soldier's condon. We require from him higher

lications than the rest of the well-we are in possession of a greater wealth, which impregnates Jur social system with a habit of her expenditure. What in others Cute an act of difficult generosity, suas ene of easy justice.

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We question if any one can realise what a ship of war was an hundred years ago. It was by looking from the quarter-deck down below that Johnson said one could " see the utmost extent of human misery—such crowding, such filth, such stench." This is vague, perhaps, and Johnson was a man with relentless prejudices, which he uttered hyperbolically he exaggerated much when he said, “ A ship is a prison, with the chance of being drowned it is worse-worse in every respect-worse air, worse food, worse company." One would not take Smollett, from his life and writings, to have been a fastidious man. He was our dear countryman, but we are bound to admit that our forefathers of his day had but faint notions of the importance of cleansing the pores of the cuticle, and scarcely enjoyed enlightened notions on drainage and ventilation. Nor did his wayward life give him many opportunities for correcting any deficiencies in his early training. When he was twenty years old, he held the office of surgeon's mate in the expedition of Vernon against Carthagena in 1741. There can be little doubt that he has described with tolerable accuracy in Roderick Random his reception into the sphere where his noble profession was to be exercised: "My friend Thomson carried me down to the cockpit, which is the place allotted for the habitation of the surgeon's mates, and when he showed me their berth (as he called it), I was filled with astonishment and horror. We descended by divers ladders to a place as dark as a dungeon, which I understood was immersed several feet under water, being immediately above the hold. I had no sooner approached this dismal gulf than my nose was saluted with an intolerable stench of putrified cheese and rancid butter that issued from an apartment at the foot of the ladder, resembling a chandler's

shop, where, by the faint glimmering of a candle, I could perceive a man with a faint meagre countenance sitting behind a kind of desk, having spectacles on his nose and a pen in his hand. This, I learned of Mr Thomson, was the ship's steward, who sat there to distribute provisions to the several messes, and to mark what each received."

The admirers of Smollett will have a pungent recollection of Roderick's fate, when he endeavoured to imitate that feat of the surgeon, which was achieved by creeping under the solid stratum of hammocks in the hospital, and cleaving his head through between them. We dare not conduct the reader further than the entrance of this hospital-it is far enough: "I assisted Thomson in making up his prescriptions; but when I followed him with the medicines into the sick berth or hospital, and observed the situation of the patients, I was much less surprised that people should die on board than that any sick person should recover. There I saw about fifty miserable distempered wretches, suspended in rows, so huddled one on another that not more than fourteen inches space was allowed to each, with his bed and bedding, and deprived of the light of the day as well as of fresh air, breathing nothing but a noisome atmosphere of the morbid steams exhaling from their own excrements and diseased bodies; devoured with vermin hatched in the filth that surrounded them, and destitute of every convenience necessary for people in that helpless condition."

It was probably in such ships that Admiral Hosier's force died off every one of them, leaving the manning of the vessels to new recruits. Nay, it has been said that the complete complement of his fleet died twice over in the lingering expedition against the Spaniards, which it was his good fortune not to survive. But all this is merely introductory to the antithesis of two examples, showing the influence of sanitary neglect and sanitary exertion on shipboard, supplied by the vital statistics of two renowned voyages round the world.

In our youth the narrative, by

Walter, of Anson's Voyage round the World, was a book deservedly popular. Its author was not stamped in any of the fixed literary moulds of his age; indeed, his style would not have stood the tests in Blair's Rhetoric. The charm of his book lies in the unconscious earnestness with which he tells the daily events of the voyage, and explains in his own way the feelings of the actors and sufferers. It is no inconsiderable testimony to the author's hold on his reader's sympathy, that he commands it through a long continuous gloomy record of mortality, disease, and despondency. The interest is brought to a climax like the histories of the sighting of land by Columbus, when the survivors reached their destination-the fruitful island of Juan Fernandez, whence their boat returned laden with grass; "for though the island abounded with better vegetables, yet the boat's crew in their short stay had not met with them, and they well knew that even grass would prove a dainty, as indeed it was all soon and eagerly devoured." But alas! they were far too late in reaching the land of promise and relief. The very possibility of landing was problematical. In one vessel, which, as the narrator says, had passed the Straits of Le Maire with between four and five hundred men in health and strength, "the lieutenant could muster no more than two quartermasters and six foremast-men capable of working." These, assisted by the officers' servants and boys, took two hours to trim the sails. When they sent 167 sick on shore, twelve died in the boats; and so many of those who reached land alive were beyond the reinvigorating power of fresh air, that for the first ten or twelve days there were six burials daily. The summation of the whole was, that when the plague was stopped, and the strength of the squadron was counted before leaving Juan Fernandez, of 961 men who had embarked in three ships, 335 were living and 626 dead. We hold this history of calamity to be peculiarly significant, because, along with some early similar misfortunes of his own, it prompted a zealous, humane, and skilful commander to turn anxiously

hand in our pockets and give him compensation, as we give it to some bloated jobber from whom we take an office where he is useless, and worse? Let us not be misunderstood in the free use of a simile. It is not strictly compensation that we would ask for the soldier, for though he has his own faults, mercenary selfishness is not among them. But since we demand that he should conduct himself with propriety and decorum, should be sedulously amenable to military discipline, and at the same time carefully observant not only of the rights, but of the tastes and prejudices of civilians-that he should be as kind, generous, and disinterested as he is brave-that he should ever suppress in himself the natural disposition to covet other men's goods, for which he has so many temptations-that he should be moderate in the assertion of his own rights, and ever ready to admit and to protect those of other people-if all these demands on imperfect human nature are to be concentrated upon him, then certainly we ought to treat him, not only with fairness, but with generosity and kindness, and, even for our own sakes, should do whatever can be done to raise his condition, remove temptation, and make the practice of the many virtues demanded of him not too difficult. We are the very nation on whom falls, before all the world, the function of raising the soldier's condition. We require from him higher qualifications than the rest of the world-we are in possession of a greater wealth, which impregnates our social system with a habit of higher expenditure. What in others would be an act of difficult generosity, is to us one of easy justice.

The question of the nature and condition of the soldier among us is so large that volumes might be profitably written about it. Let us content ourselves at present with a slight glance at the department of the question to which we have already referred the bearing upon it of that knowledge of sanitary economy which has lately been so fully developed. We shall state an antithesis of two examples-both, by the way, earlier than the labours of the present

race of sanitary economists, but not on that account less instructive-as an illustration of the resources of the science in the improvement of the army, since it records a triumph accomplished towards the other great department of our armament, the Navy.

We question if any one can realise what a ship of war was an hundred years ago. It was by looking from the quarter-deck down below that Johnson said one could "see the utmost extent of human misery-such crowding, such filth, such stench." This is vague, perhaps, and Johnson was a man with relentless prejudices, which he uttered hyperbolically: he exaggerated much when he said, “ A ship is a prison, with the chance of being drowned it is worse-worse in every respect-worse air, worse food, worse company." One would not take Smollett, from his life and writings, to have been a fastidious man. He was our dear countryman, but we are bound to admit that our forefathers of his day had but faint notions of the importance of cleansing the pores of the cuticle, and scarcely enjoyed enlightened notions on drainage and ventilation. Nor did his wayward life give him many opportunities for correcting any deficiencies in his early training. When he was twenty years old, he held the office of surgeon's mate in the expedition of Vernon against Carthagena in 1741. There can be little doubt that he has described with tolerable accuracy in Roderick Random his reception into the sphere where his noble profession was to be exercised: "My friend Thomson carried me down to the cockpit, which is the place allotted for the habitation of the surgeon's mates, and when he showed me their berth (as he called it), I was filled with astonishment and horror. We descended by divers ladders to a place as dark as a dungeon, which I understood was immersed several feet under water, being immediately above the hold. I had no sooner approached this dismal gulf than my nose was saluted with an intolerable stench of putrified cheese and rancid butter that issued from an apartment at the foot of the ladder, resembling a chandler's

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