y lighter punishments, when they have so
much at stake as the loss of such a service by frequent offences.
Some gentlemen think that a soldier does not feel disgraced by being
flogged, unless the offence for which he has been flogged is in
itself disgraceful. There is no soldier, sir, that does not feel
disgraced by being tied up to the halberts and flogged in the face of
all his comrades and the crowd that may choose to come and look at
him; the sepoys are all of the same respectable families as
ourselves, and they all enter the service in the hope of rising in
time to the same stations as ourselves, if they conduct themselves
well; their families look forward with the same hope. A man who has
been tied up and flogged knows the disgrace that it will bring upon
his family, and will sometimes rather die than return to it; indeed,
as head of a family he could not be received at home.[9] But men do
not feel disgraced in being flogged with a rattan at drill. While at
the drill they consider themselves, and are considered by us all, as
in the relation of scholars to their schoolmasters. Doing away with
the rattan at drill had a very bad effect. Young men were formerly,
with the judicious use of the rattan, made fit to join the regiment
at furthest in six months; but since the abolition of the rattan it
takes twelve months to make them fit to be seen in the ranks. There
was much virtue in the rattan, and it should never have been given
up. We have all been flogged with the rattan at the drill, and never
felt ourselves disgraced by it-we were _shagirds_ (scholars), and the
drill-sergeant, who had the rattan, was our _ustad_ (schoolmaster);
but when we left the drill, and took our station in the ranks as
sepoys, the case was altered, and we should have felt disgraced by a
flogging, whatever might have been the nature of the offence we
committed. The drill will never get on so well as it used to do,
unless the rattan be called into use again; but we apprehend no evil
from the abolition of corporal punishment afterwards. People are apt
to attribute to this abolition offences that have nothing to do with
it; and for which ample punishments are still provided. If a man
fires at his officer, people are apt to say it is because flogging
has been done away with; but a man who deliberately fires at his
officer is prepared to undergo worse punishment than flogging.[10]

'Do you not think that the increase of pay with length of service t