The Express. — 1861-09-21 (London, England)

OUR READERS.  SPORTINO INTELLIOENCE.  A !ate edition of the Express is published every evenivg during the racing season, containing the results of the dad's rams.  THAT a Commanding Officer and his Adjutant should be cruelly assassinated by one of their own men in their own barrack-square at • moment when aU seemed order, discipline, and loyalty, is a startling and serious event. In the soldier's home, as be is proud to call his barracks, an Englishman is to be found crouching in the doorway, and—with the deliberate and practised aim he has been taught to use against his enemy of the battle-field—turning his deadly weapon against his brother soldier and his officer. Revenge is • terrible instinct to arouse even in war against rightful enemies, but scarcely among the chain-gangs of the convicts, or the desperate haunts of the lowest outcasts of society, hrve there happened such savage murders for such trivial motives as this and some others which have been lately committed by soldiers on their officers. It is not very long since a sergeant was shot dead at Chatham, and hardly a year bas passed since another  non-commissioned officer fell a victim to the spite of a soldier whom it was his duty to report for neglecting to do some very insignificant work of the barrack-room. At the present time a soldier awaits his execution for besting out the brains of the sergeant whose duty it was to see the man's faults corrected. In all these cases there are none of the common aggravating circumstances which move men to revenge—no personal insult— no outrage upon a wife, a child, or a sister. The revenge in every case has been founded upon the most ignorant and brutish notions, and the murderous acts have been committed in a spirit more like that of the Romish brigands than of Englishmen. The man M'CAPPILLAY, who, though young in the service, is already evidently too familiar with military punishments, appears to have been brought before the Colonel of the depot battalion by the Adjutant for failing to keep strangers and children away from the officers' mess-room. Whether the man understood his orders fully we are not at present informed ; it has been said he mistook them, and thus incurred the blame which led to his being sent to the guard-room by the Adjutant, the late Captain I:l•Nuan, who happened to pass when the children were playing before the mess-room. The avid's°, given at the Inquest necessarily referred only to the facts proving the crime ; it has yet to be shown what were the circumstances connected possibly with WCarvcsar's remand to the guard-room, and subsequent confinement to barracks for a fortnight. It is all but incredible that such malice could have been aroused by this particular punishment, because confinement to the barrack-square would not be viewed at all as a serious disgrace by the man's comrades. It probably come out that WC/JIIIMAY had a long account against him in the defaulters' book, that he had not gained the satins' of his officers, and that his behaviour at the time when first sent to the guard-room by order of the Adjutant, and when he was last brought up before the late Colonel Caorros, was such as fully to deserve the moderate poisiehmsat awarded to him. These are points of minor importance, perhaps, as regards the conviction and final punishment of the murderer, but they have every important bearing upon the question of crime in the army, and the system of military punishments. Considering that we draw our recruits for the army from all aorta and conditions of men, caring very little about the antecedents of a raw recruit because we know the sergeant-major will do a good deal towards bring,tig him into a respectable form, both physically and morally—it is a question whether by a rigid system of recording crimes, and accumulating punishments against a defaulter, we are not goading ignorant and often violent men into a reckless state of hatred of the service and animosity against the officers. The measures for the education and general improvement of the soldier which Cie late Lord H brought about are unquestionably operating for the benefit of the service, and the crime of murder is happily rare in the army, but the number of men under punishment in barrack cells and in the military prisons, with deserters at large, forms a terrible incubus upon the service. Until this is permanently nduced by railing the '