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