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