fficiency,
and to the security of every other class, that they should be kept under
a strict discipline. An ill disciplined army has ever been a more costly
and a more licentious militia, impotent against a foreign enemy, and
formidable only to the country which it is paid to defend. A strong line
of demarcation must therefore be drawn between the soldiers and the
rest of the community. For the sake of public freedom, they must, in the
midst of freedom, be placed under a despotic rule. They must be subject
to a sharper penal code, and to a more stringent code of procedure,
than are administered by the ordinary tribunals. Some acts which in the
citizen are innocent must in the soldier be crimes. Some acts which in
the citizen are punished with fine or imprisonment must in the soldier
be punished with death. The machinery by which courts of law ascertain
the guilt or innocence of an accused citizen is too slow and too
intricate to be applied to an accused soldier. For, of all the maladies
incident to the body politic, military insubordination is that which
requires the most prompt and drastic remedies. If the evil be not
stopped as soon as it appears, it is certain to spread; and it cannot
spread far without danger to the very vitals of the commonwealth. For
the general safety, therefore, a summary jurisdiction of terrible extent
must, in camps, be entrusted to rude tribunals composed of men of the
sword.

But, though it was certain that the country could not at that moment
be secure without professional soldiers, and equally certain that
professional soldiers must be worse than useless unless they were placed
under a rule more arbitrary and severe than that to which other men were
subject, it was not without great misgivings that a House of Commons
could venture to recognise the existence and to make provision for the
government of a standing army. There was scarcely a public man of note
who had not often avowed his conviction that our polity and a standing
army could not exist together. The Whigs had been in the constant habit
of repeating that standing armies had destroyed the free institutions of
the neighbouring nations. The Tories had repeated as constantly that, in
our own island, a standing army had subverted the Church, oppressed the
gentry, and murdered the King. No leader of either party could, without
laying himself open to the charge of gross inconsistency, propose that
such an army should henceforth be one o