HUMANITIES OF THE HORSE GUARDS: BRANDING. THE authorities at the
Horse Guards profess great anxiety to raise the moral feeling of the Army ; the country professes no less anxiety to prevent degrading and cruel punishments from being inflicted upon our soldiers • yet the following order, which has lately been issued by the Commander-in-chief, passes unheeded alike by the Government, by the Representatives of the People, and by the People themselves. " Horse,Guards, 25th June 1847.--Circular Memorandum.—The mode of mark- ing deserters by means of an instrument, prescribed by the circular letter of the 5th of May 1842, having been found ineffectual and easily erased, the Commander- in-chief has, on the recommendation of a Board of influential medical officers to whom the subject has been referred, been pleased to direct that the use of the said instrument may be discontinued, and the method of marking with needles be revert- ed to throughout the service. His Grace the Commander-in-chief further desires that the operation of marking deserters may henceforth always take place in the hospital, under the superintendence of a medical officer, who will be held re- sponsible that it is effectually performed, and that the letter 'D' shall be in- delibly impressed on the skin. By command of Field-Marshal the Commander- in-chief."
This order is in accordance with a provision of the Mutiny Act ; the eleventh clause of which provides that a court-martial may, "for the first and every subsequent conviction of desertion, in addition to any other punishment, sentence the offender to be marked on the left side, two inches below the arm-pit, with the letter D ; such letter not to be less than an inch long, and to be marked upon the skin with some ink or gunpowder or other pre- paration, so as to be visible and conspicuous, and not liable to be obliterated."
It thus appears, that though the barbarous punishments of burning alive, embowelling, slitting of nostrils, cutting off of hands and ears, pillory, whipping of women, and other revolting acts, no longer disgrace our laws, yet that every man who deserts from his regiment may be branded with an indelible mark of in- famy,—a stain that is not affixed to the most atrocious ruffian. There is no false humanity or morbid tenderness for crime in denouncing a practice which is as unnecessary as it is cruel and impolitic. Any punishment which so lowers the mind in its own esteem that neither reflection nor repentance can restore self-respect, is repugnant to the first principles of justice. If a hope of recovering his place in the eyes of his comrades should present itself to the offender, it must be destroyed when he remembers the "damned spot" of guilt which he bears on his person and which time itself cannot efface. The man who is branded is for ever degraded ; the stain is as deep upon his soul as upon his flesh ; and he knows that he is the scorn of the world.
The spirit of the new order is not its least disgusting feature. The sign is to be "indelibly impressed"; and because the former process has not been sufficiently efficacious, medical science is to be called upon—not to save pain, nor, as in the case of flog- ging, to prevent excess of agony from causing death—but to see that the mark is so deeply graven into the skin by needles and gunpowder, that human art shall avail as little as moral repent- ance in obliterating the stigma.
The history of branding shows that marking deserters is as mo- dern as it is odious.
Branding the brawn of the left thumb in cases of laymen claiming benefit of clergy is very ancient ; but it does not appear that a similar punishment existed for other crimes until the reign of William the Third, when dealers in clippings of the coin were branded in the left cheek near the nose with the letter R, and fined 5001.* "But," says Blackstone, "such an indelible stigma being found by experience to render offenders desperate, this pro- vision was repealed about seven years afterwards"; and branding on the hand has also long been practically abolished,-1- being too brutal for the present age. There is, however, no trace of soldiers having ever been branded by law, in the darkest periods of English history ; though desertion was made felony by Henry the Sixth, and though it might be, and often has been, punished with death. But that which seemed too cruel for ages familiar with suffering in every form, and in which sound and humane principles of legislation were almost unknown, was thought fit for the nineteenth century. Severe as are the exactions of the Mutiny Acts from the reign of William to the latter part of that of George the Third, and though the British soldier might be shot or flogged for desertion, he could not be branded. If shot for his crime, death covered his shame as it had avenged his faults. If scourged, the lacerations of the whip might have healed ; and, after years of good conduct, self-respect, and with:it the good opinion of others, may have returned. In March 1807, for the first time, branding of deserters suggested itself to some military despot, who, no doubt, plumed himself on having dis- covered a plan for preventing a man who had forgotten his duty in one regiment from striving to begin a new career and to gam a new character in another. Perhaps the desire of saving a second bounty for enlistment, rather than punishment of the crime itself, was the principal motive for adopting this regulation.
Nothing can be farther from the object of these remarks than to defend desertion or fraud ; and it is not forgotten that they involve perjury. But there is ample punishment in the military code, God knows, for all these crimes, without attaching to the soldier a mark of perpetual infamy, which renders him hardened and desperate, which militates against repentance and amendment, and which is not inflicted upon other perjurers or felons. Trans- port, imprison, nay shoot and flog, if dire necessity compel it; but let not a Christian man be placed on a level with a beast, or an English soldier be subject to a permanent taint of disgrace, from which the humanity of his countrymen has exempted even the lowest and basest of his species. Happily, this odious punishment does not disgrace the Naval code.
Stat. 6 and 7 will. in. c. 17. t Stat. IS Geo. ILL e. 741 &
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