6 APRIL 1867, Page 8

THE LIBERALS AND MILITARY DISCIPLINE.

OH for a little honesty! If only one Liberal leader, say Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Bright, one Liberal of "advanced" views, say Mr. Forster or Mr. Stansfeld, or even Mr. Peter Taylor, would but get up and deliver his mind, and not what he supposes to be his constituents' mind, upon the discipline ef an army ! One-half the difficulties in the way of a free military organization would instantly disappear, and we should be at liberty to alter the whole position of the soldier, not only with the assent but the hearty support of the best old officers in the service. These gentlemen, who are over fifty, and have 'organized regiments, and governed regiments, and carried regi- ments and brigades under fire, of whom one of the ablest of their comrades once said to the writer—" They may be preju- diced, may be silly—don't say they ain't—but just see how they wake up when the cannon begin, what men the old fogies are then !"—govern the British Army, and they are all, Whig and Tory alike, under one persistent delusion. They think that a more popular House of Commons, a more .democratic Government, to use their own expression, would ex necessitate rei, in obedience to some law beyond experience and above evidence, weaken the discipline of the Army. It is of no use to quote analogies to them. If we remark that the only genuinely democratic Government which ever existed, the French Convention, organized the terrible dis- ,cipline of France, the reply is that the French are a mili- tary nation, and the English are not. If we state that there never was anywhere a discipline so terribly stern as that of the old American Army and Navy, we shall be told that Southerners commanded in both, and that in the former the privates were mostly mercenary foreigners. If driven to despair, we show that the discipline in our Fleet, which is cinder Parliament, is twice as severe as the discipline in our Army, which is under the Crown, we shall be silenced by the argument of visible necessity. "A captain in the Navy must be stern, Sir, must, or the ship is wrecked !" An idea abso- lutely immovable influences these old gentlemen, that a new -discipline under a popular Government must be feeble, and they fight for every relic of the traditionary modes of coercion as if they were resisting attacks upon their property rights. People think, and the penny papers say, that their conduct is all prejudice ; but it is not all prejudice, or anything resem- bling prejudice, but a sincere belief that the welfare of the coun- try is bound up in these ancient " rights " of authority. One- half of the old officers who fight so bitterly for flogging would be happier men if flogging were abolished, two-thirds of them would, indeed do, sanction the most extraordinary breaches of law, custom, and orders, rather than flog a decently good man. But they say, "We must have discipline ; and discipline means two things, the power of enforcing obedience somehow in cantonment, for which we are willing to rely on drill, fines, and imprisonment, and the power of enforcing swift obedience in the field, for which we cannot rely on anything except the lash or death. Death would horrify the country, and we must therefore retain the lash, as we have got it, as long as we can."

We say this is the secret theory of men who abhor the lash, who, like the late Lord Clyde, would, in a series of years, with .seventy thousand men to keep in order, never once employ a means which they consider degrading, but which, nevertheless, they will never in theory surrender. They do not care a straw for the right of flogging, they even hate it, as tending to make soldiership, which they think honourable, degrading in the eyes of the public ; but they think that the Liberals are masters, and that the Liberals, if allowed to alter the old discipline, will take all nerve and fibre out of it. It is a pure delusion, based mainly, we are bound to say, upon the pusil- lanimous reticence of Liberals themselves. All history proves 'that Democrats are the sternest disciplinarians, and though we -admit that there are remarkable points of difference between the English Radical and the "fled" of any country or of any time, still we know that upon this question the English Radical theory is totally different from anything old officers believe. It is at least as stern as their own,

though more respectful to those who have to obey it. That theory is, we believe, in essence this. An army is essential to the safety or, to put it more plainly, to the exist- ence of the State. Consequently, a State, having if free a distinct moral right to exist, and if it can to keep in existence, has a moral right to maintain an army. If possible, it should compose that army of persons willing to serve, but in the rare cases in which this is impossible it has a distinct moral claim to the aid of every human being, who, benefiting by the State. is bound to offer his life in defence of its existence, or, same being freely selected, of its policy. The vital principle of an army, that which makes it a scientific organization, and not an armed mob, is that the persons entrusted by law with the power of giving orders should have those orders obeyed readily in time of peace, instantly, as well as readily, in time of war. To refuse such obedience in matters of " duty,"— mark how the word explains and justifies the national senti- ment,—is a moral offence at all times, and in the field a moral offence equivalent to overt treason. The soldier who on service will not obey a service order is simply a traitor, a man who has in the supreme moment betrayed the country he has engaged to serve, who risks the• lives of thou- sands to gratify his own selfishness—a scoundrel, mean morally, and socially dangerous in the extreme degree. In time of peace he must be punished up to the point needful to make obedience a mental habit, in time of war, or " service " equivalent to war, he must die. He may be morally as innocent as it is possible for a mean man to be. He may be a coward, and no man since the world was made was ever a coward with his own conscious consent. He may be infatuated with a belief that to be a soldier is sinful, but even in these rare and extreme cases, cases so rare and extreme that we do the argument injustice in producing them, the State, acting in an interest above that of any individual, has a moral right to inflict death. It has, in fact, precisely the same right to shoot its own subject as to order its armed enemies to be shot in battle. We declare honestly, after a communion of years with advanced Liberals, we never in our lives heard any one question these principles, never met a man who doubted that blank refusal to obey a service order on board a national ship, or in a national regiment, was justly and morally punishable with death. If we are exaggerating in any degree, let Mr. Goldwin Smith or Mr. F. Harrison, —" extreme" enough both of them to satisfy any Tory—tell us publicly wherein we misrepresent their thought. We believe firmly that if the educated Radicals of every grade were polled to-morrow, with the uneducated Radicals behind them, not ' one man in five hundred would resist or condemn the penalty of death—by shooting, not hanging—for insubordination in the field, not one in five the same penalty for striking an officer on ditty in cantonment. The only resistance would come from a section of the middle class, in whom long con- tinued physical comfort has created a disbelief in the utility of discipline, a secret dislike of all punishment or compulsion whatsoever. Every Radical would probably put in his own rider. Most would affirm that to entrust such power to a caste, as we do now, or, indeed, to any but " elected " officers, 1. e., officers specially picked for the qualities of command by either the nation or the men would be unjust ; many would add that enlistment must be voluntary, or at least discharge voluntary after a few months' trial ; and a few would protest that the cause must approve itself to the individual mind ; but on the principle we do not believe there would be a dis- cussion. Nor on the practice. The Duke of Cambridge thinks evidently, as almost all General officers think, that if a man who, being sober, struck an officer on duty were shot thecountry would explode with wrath and pity. We do not believe a word of it. The masses in this country have far too little instead of too much horror of death as a means of enforcing duty, and the educated classes may be tested by the example of Anglo- Indians, who have repeatedly •supported, with unbroken unanimity, sentences of death for insubordination. All the Liberals demand is that the soldier shall be free to depart, if the service is to him insupportable ; that he shall have a clear road to become an officer if it is in him ; that the court._, martial which condemns shall have one private amongst its members, not to over-ride the officers, but to ensure the other side fair hearing ; that the officer shall seer as well as the soldier ; and, finally, that the offence shall be really_ one in- volving the discipline of the Army. A man is not to be shot because he strikes an officer for intriguing with his wife—one of the very worst causes of insubordination in some foreign sta- tions; orbecause, being drunk, he kicks the decidedly abusive

corporal who puts him in irons ; or because he loses his re- spect in a civil squabble. The Court must judge whether the resistance was resistance to military duty, but if it was, public opinion in England would be as stern and pitiless as in France and America. The soldier who disobeys a distinct service order is a traitor, wilfully threatening the existence of England as a nation, wilfully imperilling thousands of lives, and he must die.

But, question old officers, if it is right, morally right, to kill a order to maintain discipline, why is it morally wrong to flog ? It is not morally wrong in the abstract, and allowing for the natural exaggeration of debate, whether in the House or in the Press, nobody ever said it was. It is possible to conceive a race among whom flogging, conveying no dishonour and ex- citing no vindictiveness, would be the best punishment con- ceivable; and we believe that is actually the case with some of the tribes of Northern India, who are brave men neverthe- less. But every punishment is evil whieh necessarily makes men worse,—the exact reason why the popular idea of Hell is so fiendish,—and races do reach stages of civilization in which flogging, or the liability to flogging, makes the immense majority of them worse. The French reached that stage some time ago. Owing partly, no doubt, to reminiscences of a bad feudal system, the Frenchman holds the lash in a regard which makes a lashed man consider suicide honourable by comparison. The lash, that is, makes him worse, inverts the only end for which punishment can, except as a deterrent, be morally justifiable, and the oldest English officer would say at once it was unjust and inexpedient to lash Frenchmen. This has now, through the progress of civilization, that is, through the development of a mental phase in which honour is above physical pain, become also the condition, not indeed of all Eng- lishmen, but of all those Englishmen whom we wish to become soldiers. Everybody feels that to flog officers would be wicked, not because of the pain, which they might bear as well as the men, but because of the moral injury. The majority of English- men have reached in this respect the same grade of feeling, and flogging has therefore become morally wrong, an extreme injury both to those who inflict and those who are liable to suffer it. It ought to be abolished on moral grounds, as well as grounds of expediency ; but that is no reason why dis- cipline, which is a strictly justifiable and beneficial social principle, should -be given up or relaxed, and the key-note of discipline is, that as the lives of multitudes and the life of the State depend on the obedience of each soldier, his obedience must be secured, even if lives are forfeited to secure it. Absolute obedience to orders on duty once secured, minor discipline may, as in the French and American Armies, be relaxed with perfect safety. It is because our discipline is so weak, not because it is so strong, that we are com- pelled to keep up such rigid distinctions between officers and men, Such an immense distance between a private who may be a corporal to-morrow, and a corporal who was a private yesterday. If ever our Array is properly organized as an honourable profession, with decent pay and open careers, dis- missal will probably become, as it was in the old Sepoy Army, the most dreaded of the secondary punishments, but it will still be necessary to visit wilful disobedience with death. So inflicted, public opinion will no more resent it than it resents the action of Providence, which decrees that if a man will jump off a precipice, or swallow poison, or set any one of a hundred laws at defiance, he shall die in consequence. Wilful disobedience on service, or the striking of an officer on duty, are voluntary acts, as voluntary as any other form of suicide. The belief that discipline cannot be enforced among Englishmen except by some torture stopping short of death, but infinitely worse than death, proceeds solely from the profound distrust felt by a limited caste in the moral fibre and intellectual strength of the people below it.