session passed without a Mutiny Bill.
When at length it became evident that a political change of the highest
importance was taking place in such a manner as almost to escape notice,
a clamour was raised by some factious men desirous to weaken the hands
of the government, and by some respectable men who felt an honest but
injudicious reverence for every old constitutional tradition, and who
were unable to understand that what at one stage in the progress of
society is pernicious may at another stage be indispensable. This
clamour however, as years rolled on, became fainter and fainter.
The debate which recurred every spring on the Mutiny Bill came to be
regarded merely as an occasion on which hopeful young orators fresh
from Christchurch were to deliver maiden speeches, setting forth how
the guards of Pisistratus seized the citadel of Athens, and how the
Praetorian cohorts sold the Roman empire to Didius. At length
these declamations became too ridiculous to be repeated. The most
oldfashioned, the most eccentric, politician could hardly, in the reign
of George the Third, contend that there ought to be no regular soldiers,
or that the ordinary law, administered by the ordinary courts, would
effectually maintain discipline among such soldiers. All parties being
agreed as to the general principle, a long succession of Mutiny Bills
passed without any discussion, except when some particular article of
the military code appeared to require amendment. It is perhaps because
the army became thus gradually, and almost imperceptibly, one of the
institutions of England, that it has acted in such perfect harmony with
all her other institutions, has never once, during a hundred and sixty
years, been untrue to the throne or disobedient to the law, has never
once defied the tribunals or overawed the constituent bodies. To this
day, however, the Estates of the Realm continue to set up periodically,
with laudable jealousy, a landmark on the frontier which was traced
at the time of the Revolution. They solemnly reassert every year the
doctrine laid down in the Declaration of Rights; and they then grant
to the Sovereign an extraordinary power to govern a certain number of
soldiers according to certain rules during twelve months more.

In the same week in which the first Mutiny Bill was laid on the table
of the Commons, another temporary law, made necessary by the unsettled
state of the kingdom, was passed. Since the flight of James many pe