or supposed to be understood. You
have solemnly devoted yourselves to be English soldiers, for the
guardianship of England. I want you to feel what this vow of yours
indeed means, or is gradually coming to mean. You take it upon you,
first, while you are sentimental schoolboys; you go into your military
convent, or barracks, just as a girl goes into her convent while she is
a sentimental schoolgirl; neither of you then know what you are about,
though both the good soldiers and good nuns make the best of it
afterwards. You don't understand perhaps why I call you 'sentimental'
schoolboys, when you go into the army? Because, on the whole, it is love
of adventure, of excitement, of fine dress and of the pride of fame, all
which are sentimental motives, which chiefly make a boy like going into
the Guards better than into a counting-house. You fancy, perhaps, that
there is a severe sense of duty mixed with these peacocky motives? And
in the best of you, there is; but do not think that it is principal. If
you cared to do your duty to your country in a prosaic and unsentimental
way, depend upon it, there is now truer duty to be done in raising
harvests than in burning them; more in building houses, than in shelling
them--more in winning money by your own work, wherewith to help men,
than in taxing other people's work, for money wherewith to slay men;
more duty finally, in honest and unselfish living than in honest and
unselfish dying, though that seems to your boys' eyes the bravest. So
far then, as for your own honour, and the honour of your families, you
choose brave death in a red coat before brave life in a black one, you
are sentimental; and now see what this passionate vow of yours comes
to. For a little while you ride, and you hunt tigers or savages, you
shoot, and are shot; you are happy, and proud, always, and honoured and
wept if you die; and you are satisfied with your life, and with the end
of it; believing, on the whole, that good rather than harm of it comes
to others, and much pleasure to you. But as the sense of duty enters
into your forming minds, the vow takes another aspect. You find that you
have put yourselves into the hand of your country as a weapon. You have
vowed to strike, when she bids you, and to stay scabbarded when she bids
you; all that you need answer for is, that you fail not in her grasp.
And there is goodness in this, and greatness, if you can trust the hand
and heart of the Britomart who has br