44

HISIOHT OP ENGLAND.

CHAP.

XI.

16S9.

ciplined army has ever been a more costly and a more licentiousmilitia, impotent against a foreign enemy, and formidable onlyto the country -which it is paid to defend. A strong line ofdemarcation must therefore be drawn between the soldiers andthe rest of the community. For the sake of public freedom,they must, in the midst of freedom, be placed under a despoticrule. . They must be subject to a sharper penal code, and toa more stringent code of procedure, than are administeredby the ordinary tribunals. Some acts which in the citizen areinnocent must in the soldier be crimes. Some acts which inthe citizen are punished with fine or imprisonment must in thesoldier be punished with death. The machinery by which courtsof law ascertain the guilt or innocence of an accused citizen istoo slow and too intricate to be applied to an accused soldier.For, of all the maladies incident to the body politic, militaryinsubordination is that which requires the most prompt anddrastic remedies. If the evil be not stopped as soon as itappears, it is certain to spread; and it cannot spread far with-out danger to the very vitals of the commonwealth. For thegeneral safety, therefore, a summary jurisdiction of terribleextent must, in camps, be entrusted to rude tribunals composedof men of the sword.

But, though it was certain that the country could not at thatmoment be secure without professional soldiers, and equallycertain that professional soldiers must be worse than uselessunless they were placed under a rule more arbitrary and severethan that to which other men were subject, it was not withoutgreat misgivings that a House of Commons could venture torecognise the existence and to make provision for the govern-ment of a standing army. There was scarcely a public man ofnote who had not often avowed his conviction that our polityand a standing army could not exist together. The Whigs hadbeen in the constant habit of repeating that standing armies