the wrong place and lenient in the wrong place. The cruelty and baseness
of Glenlyon and his comrades excite, even after the lapse of a hundred
and sixty years, emotions which make it difficult to reason calmly.
Yet whoever can bring himself to look at the conduct of these men with
judicial impartiality will probably be of opinion that they could
not, without great detriment to the commonwealth, have been treated
as assassins. They had slain nobody whom they had not been positively
directed by their commanding officer to slay. That subordination without
which an army is the worst of all rabbles would be at an end, if every
soldier were to be held answerable for the justice of every order
in obedience to which he pulls his trigger. The case of Glencoe was,
doubtless, an extreme case; but it cannot easily be distinguished in
principle from cases which, in war, are of ordinary occurrence. Very
terrible military executions are sometimes indispensable. Humanity
itself may require them. Who then is to decide whether there be an
emergency such as makes severity the truest mercy? Who is to determine
whether it be or be not necessary to lay a thriving town in ashes, to
decimate a large body of mutineers, to shoot a whole gang of banditti?
Is the responsibility with the commanding officer, or with the rank and
file whom he orders to make ready, present and fire? And if the general
rule be that the responsibility is with the commanding officer, and
not with those who obey him, is it possible to find any reason for
pronouncing the case of Glencoe an exception to that rule? It is
remarkable that no member of the Scottish Parliament proposed that any
of the private men of Argyle's regiment should be prosecuted for murder.
Absolute impunity was granted to everybody below the rank of Serjeant.
Yet on what principle? Surely, if military obedience was not a valid
plea, every man who shot a Macdonald on that horrible night was a
murderer. And, if military obedience was a valid plea for the musketeer
who acted by order of Serjeant Barbour, why not for Barbour who acted
by order of Glenlyon? And why not for Glenlyon who acted by order of
Hamilton? It can scarcely be maintained that more deference is due
from a private to a noncommissioned officer than from a noncommissioned
officer to his captain, or from a captain to his colonel.

It may be said that the orders given to Glenlyon were of so peculiar a
nature that, if he had been a man of v