The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1876-02-19 00:00:00

riaious-1-aboolloo-bytheradititant, or

pio-

duty should the adjutant not be in barracks; His
Royal Highness does not wish to lay down any very
positive regulations, but desires me to express hisviews
generally on the subject for the consideration of d cers
mm coanding corps in your district.—l have, &c.
f
r s.or. ArßoNtl,-D "epi3tyiAdjutant-Ge ceral,',
The Time sof Saturday, in a leading article upon the abol-o
. letter, makes the following remarks:— -- -
. • . Discipline in the Army is so strict, and obedi-
ence to orders must be so very promptly rendered,
that those who are responsible for the good beh4vlOUrsj
of the rest are necessarily armed with powers Which
they do not always know how to use discreetli, and
which they are -under. a .natural temptation to abuse.
This fault is of course found most frequently among offi.
cials of the same social grade as the comrades over whose
heads they. have been promoted. The love of being
unjust or Insolent to an inferior is one of the infir-
mities of a vulgar mind. It is still more inexcusable in
a gentleman, but it is--one, we fear, from whioh our
younger commissioned officers have not always
been exempt. None can wonder that, as the Duke of.
Cambridge's letter informs us, the corresponding
fault of insubordination should be a great deal,tod,
common; and that it should be punished most
severely is only in accordance with regular military
tradition. It is greatly to the honour of the Duke
of Cambridge that he should have seen the excuses
which may be pleaded for petty acts of revolt which
it is yet impossible to justify, that he should have
referred them to their true cause, and should have
indicated the way in which they may be most wisely
dealt with. The young soldier who has only lately
enlisted will feel the pressure .of a strict military
rule long before he has had time to acquire the
habits of military obedience. It is at least natural
that he should somewhat chafe under the unwonted
yoke,. and that he should nurse an anger which he does
not venture at first to display against those who
impose it upon him, not always most wisely or con-
siderately. At last comas the unlucky moment
when temper is under less control than usual, or when
the provocation has been unusually great. The feeling
of annoyance which has been long cherished and brooded
over, ia now suddenly stirred into life, and breaks
forth into A ivord of insolent reply, or in a downright
refusal to Obi3y orders, probably repented of almost
as soon as it has been uttered. That a superior who
has been thus publicly defied should take meana
to vindicate his authority is only natural and proper.
The chief purpose of the Duke of Cambridge's
letter is to direct what thoie' means are to be. If

'I

the case to be dealt with is one of deliberate insubor-
dination, it is of course beyond all excuse, and must
be treated as a grave military crime. But the mere
fault of a loss of temper—a fault, too, which has very
probably not been wholly on one side—is a very much
lie 3r matter, and may be atoned for without any
e. severity of punishment. The authority which
been outraged, and which must in all circum-
stances be supported, may be appeased, the Duke of
Cambridge thinks, by a public apology and by an ex-
pression of regret for what has happened. If any
punishment is added, it should be slight, and should
be inflicted not by solemn sentence of a Court-martial,
but summarily by the officer in command of the
offender's company.
This expression of opinion in high quarters is likely
to be welcomed by the private soldier, and by the
classes from which in England the private soldier must
come. We are not equally assured of the reception it
may meet from those to whom it is actually addressed,
and from others to whom it refers. Prompt unreason-
ing obedience has in many cases been the one demand
made upon our soldiers by their officers, and for those
who have centred all virtue in this it will be difficult to
listen with any Patience to what may sound to them
like a plea for iusnberdination. If the Duke's letter
idniiteof being so interpreted, it is because the occa-
sion for the advice it contains has long existed un-
acknowledged, and a state of things has been developed
which is really indefensible. But let us look at the case
as it really stands. Let us think of the early training
which our soldiers have received before they have
joined the Army, and see how far it has prepared
or has unfitted them for their career. We will take as
an example one type out of many, all of which might
from a somawha,t different point of view be shown in
the same colours. The simplest case of all, and one
of the most common, is that of the village lad—we
will not say the ne'er•do-weel of the 'neighbourhood,
but, at all events, not the most conspicuous for the
regular discharge of the daily duties of his station.
He has left school for some years, and has been living
at a loose end since. He has not done much work
or obeyed many orders; he is almost certainly some-
thing of a poacher, and it would be well if poaching
wore the gravest offence of which he might prove
capable. Nevertheless, he is not a bad fellow after
all, and needs chiefly a change in his .surroundings.
In an evil, or, as we prefer to regard it, in a
good, hour he comes across the recruiting sergeant,
lends an ear to the tale told him of the splen-
dours of a military life, takes the Queen's shilling,
and becomes a soldier. That the fond hopes Of the
ploughboy, or tradesman, or mechanic, or whatever
else the young recruit may have been, should not be
at once obviously fulfilled is too much a matter of
course to need stating. But the smart is needlessly
aggravated if he finds himself not only amenable to
strict rules of which, geod as they generally are, he
does not at once perceive the necessity, not only corn.
pelled to render outward signs of respect to his known
superiors in station, but further, and. worse than all,
exposed to the caprices of a being originally of his own
rank, but now vested with a power with which he has
not yet grown familiar, and which he is, perhaps, a little
too fond of using if only to assure himself and others of
its reality. That an explosion will follow when the two
forces meet is only too probable. Discipline must be vindi-
cated in a necessarily one-sided fashion, but the moral
blame of What has happened in the supposed- case may
in all fairness be less unequally divided. The feelings
and habits of the classes from which the Army is re-
cruited have changed. The abolition of flogging points
we will not say to a relaxation of discipline, but, at all
events, to another kind of discipline, to be maintained
by other sanctions. The raw material, meanwhile,
from which our soldiers are to come has grown a good
deal leas easy to fashion. Passive obedience is a quality
not much in vogue just now anywhere, and it is least
of all likely to be found in the stuff which goes to
make a soldier. Men revolt now against treatment to
which their fathers would have submitted without a

word of complaint. It is not likely that those of them
who choose a career which calls for the highest and
most manly spirit should be the tamest of the whole
body. It is hard enough to induce them to yield to the
necessary requirements of their new life. To go beyond
these, and to force our young .soldiers to bow their neck
meekly to an unjust or unequal yoke, has become
simply impossible. Men will not enlist at all with the
known prospect of such a life before them; or, if they
do enlist, they will not prove to be of the proper sort
for the purpose to which they are to be put. It is both
right and prudent to recognize, as the Duke of Cam-
bridge has done, these essential facts. The petty
tyranny of which his letter speaks might long ago have
been redressed with advantage to both parties. That
it should be swept away has now become imperative,
and we are glad to find a Commander-in-Chief who
has the sense and courage to proclaim what has been
too long notorious. It now remains for the Officers of
our Army to address themselves in earnest to remedy
it.

There will be some, no doubt, as we have already
hinted, who will wrest the Duke's letter to a
sense it cannot have been intended to bear, and
who will choose to see in it, not a wise direction
for the proper maintenance of discipline in the
Army, but rather the admission of an existing want
of discipline and an attempt to excuse oi• explain
away- the damaging fact. We may admit that there
was a time well within the memory of living ,men; when
wreecruvite
the letter would have sounded stijang'ely. When the
tstute .;:of the labour market and the condition and
aahi
working-hclasses
e re rYwas.d'ilffeedkrelled p t uPooran
simply as BO much food for powder, to be. replaced as
what sdae fy the
are
fast as used up; when the lash was in almost daily
use, and when the wants and comforts of the soldiers
were scarcely thought of, it is quite natural that Army
'discipline should have been a very different thing from
what it is now. The change . has 'been a matter of
course; nor need we on any account waste time in
regretting it. We would 'not be gh6ught to under-
Ivalue military, discipline. It is because we are con-
-11+,63,1 of the absolute necessity of- maintaining it
. that we desire to see it wisely administered and
cleared of old •faults and oriStructions. • When we
think of what a soldier's life is, of the power placed in
his -hands, of the kind of service we expect him to
render, it is clear that he needs a special training in
more than the outward duties of his profession,' and
that in the interests of society he must conform' to
stricter rules than need be imposed on civilians. That
he should do this in such a way as to-involve no loss
of self-respect is the demand which he is more or less
corsciously urging; or which others are urging on his
behalf. The old order has somewhat changed, and the
exact type of our former armies has gones 'little out
of date. The material with which we:lave now to
work has at once improved and has become more
difficult to obtain. We must be prepared to treat it
more carefully when we have got it, and we need not
fear that we shall findit less suitable to our purposes.
I THE DUTY ON GAME LICENCE.

The Commissioners of Inland Revenue in their
report for 1875 express their dissatisfaction with the
collection of duty on game licences. W.hile it is used
by game preservers as a means of punishing poachers,
there can be no doubt that among persotis of a higher
station in life it is very largely evaled. Nor can their
officers, they remark, be expected tnmake any great
number of detections so long as it is bonsideredby land.
owners and magistrates that a demand for the produc.
Mon of a liVence is an unwarrantable insult, as the
Commissioners find that it invariably is, and so long
as their offteers are not only treated with indignity`but
reported to the Board as deserving of censure for
their couduct if, step they come abrOasi a 81100 ting