and fierce were the debates which took place in the House of Commons; loud and subtle were the harangues of a Wyndham, a Pelham, and a Pulteney. Rome and its Pretorian guards were cited as historical illustrations to prove how dangerous standing armies are to the "liberty of the subject," and how necessary it was for every Englishman to resist such encroachment. It was the thin end of the wedge, they declared, which, if once inserted, every evil would ensue. After much discussion and the exhibition of much hot temper, a compromise was effected in the passing of the Mutiny Bill, which invested the Crown with large powers "to make regulations for the good government of the army, and to frame the Articles of War;" and these now form the military code. But the operation of this act is limited to one year; so jealous was the House of the law and the liberty of the subject. Hemmed in, then, by wise and necessary restrictions, dependent upon a vote of Parliament, and indirectly controlled by it, the army has become a recognised part of the Constitution. It is not our intention to enter into details of its organisation. It is a purely voluntary body, raised by enlistment. There is no conscription, no compulsion, used to fill its ranks; and though the tricks and stratagems of over-zealous recruiting-sergeants may have occasionally to be condemned, the recruit enters the dépôt of his own free will and act, and has even time for repentance left him, if he regrets the step he has adopted. The total strength of the British army at the present day, is 148,242 men. These troops are scattered about in every part of the world-in Africa and Asia, America and Australasia, in India and China, at the Cape of Good Hope and along the Gold Coast, in Canada and the West Indies, in New Zealand and British Columbia, so vast and wide-spread are the colonies and dependencies of Great Britain. In addition to this regular army-75,000 of whom are serving, it should be observed, in India-there is a militia force consisting of upwards of 158,000 men, liable to so many days' training in the course of the year. Nor must we lose sight of that young army of citizen-troops who have enrolled themselves for the defence of the country, and whose numbers are daily increasing. Already the Volunteers muster 163,000 strong; and all of them, with the exception of some 20 or 30,000, have been pronounced by Colonel M'Murdo to be efficient and ready soldiers.

Before concluding this paper, it will be worth while to study a little what may be called the "arithmetic of war;" and by way of aiding us in this task let us consult the following table. In it the population and revenue of each country are given-in round numbers of courseas well as the strength and expense of its army.

As already remarked, standing armies are a material evil. By this table we see that, in Europe alone, no less than 4,690,000 able-bodied men are subtracted from the honest and civilising industries of life, and devoted to a profession of idleness in times of peace, and of slaughter and rapine in times of war. The cost of this colossal force is estimated

and the estimate is considerably under the mark-at above 83,000,0007. sterling. But even these figures by no means represent the true cost.

We have the sums as laid down in the various budgets, and drawn from the available income of the country. But were we to add the loans upon loans which have been and are being contracted to maintain these "uniformed obstructions" to the progress of the world, we should have a terrible and appalling total indeed. As it is, what a frightful incubus upon the healthy development of society is this vast organisation of stagnant energy! what a menace to the peaceful daily pursuits of the quiet citizen! Look abroad upon the face of the Continent at the present moment, and see how it tyrannises over the liberties of mankind, while it eats up the resources of even the wealthiest kingdoms, threatening nearly all with poverty and bankruptcy. Every nation, in fear of its neighbour, maintains a force totally incompatible with its revenues; and as to a majority of the states, the forces they do keep up are really inadequate for their defence. Yet the mania for vast and expensive armies and armaments increases instead of diminishing, and the chief study nowadays is how to make war more horrible and destructive. How long this demoralising and restless rivalry will continue, how long this game will be played before it is "played out," it is impossible to say. The peoples must wait long, we fear, before the ambitions of rulers will be satiated, or have substantial checks applied to them. Congresses may be convened, and plenipotentiaries gather round a green table; but until another gospel is proclaimed than that preached by crowned heads and star-bespangled diplomatists, the idea of permanent peace and reduced armaments seems altogether hopeless and utopian.

[91]

Manners to Mend.

BY GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA.

THE age, there is no use in denying the fact, is a tame one; or at least to us, contrasting it with the last, it seems so. Chi va piano va sano is our motto. Voltaire told the world a hundred years ago that virtue had fled from the human heart and taken refuge on the lips. However this may be, it is certain that vice nowadays wears a clean shirt (often with malachite studs in it), and is very particular about brushing its teeth and paring its nails. A wicked man blushes to wear his heart upon his sleeve. The profligate man in this era would be ashamed to be seen in the Haymarket: He shudders at the stories his elders tell him about the "finish" and the saloons of the theatres. He would be unutterably shocked were he caught by the police in a back-room in Jermyn Street punting at chicken-hazard. Drunkenness he scorns as a vice peculiar to the lower orders. Cool drinks and cigar-smoking, conducive as they are to slow sipping and deliberate emission of vapour-rings, have quietly put an end to duelling. An insulted man chews the cud of his wrong, and takes a slow polite vengeance by genteelly defaming his enemy outof-doors, or slandering his neighbour's wife, or buying-up his bills, or criticising his works. You must not horsewhip a man nowadays. He will have you up to Bow Street, and you will be sent to gaol. If you kick an insolent cad, you are considered little better than a garrotter, and treated accordingly. You must not post him as a liar or a coward. If you do, he will have the law of you, and you will be cast in heavy damages. If you wish to throw vitriol over any body, or to exhibit aqua tofana to a few of whom you wish to be rid, you must fling your missile from round the corner, and administer your poison in private.

If a Colonel Charteris of our time were to be convicted at the Old Bailey of such a crime as that he was actually tried for, he would be as completely abandoned by his aristocratic acquaintance as the luckless William Roupell was lately repudiated by the politicians who sat by his side in the House of Commons and dined with him at the Pall-Mall clubs. He is not the "thing"-it is "bad form" to recognise a man who has been found guilty by a jury of his countrymen. Yet dukes and marquises, and earls and baronets, came forward to save Charteris from the rope he so richly deserved. He was a degraded brutal sensualist; but he was a man of fashion, and enormously wealthy. In the present temper of society it is a matter for congratulation that neither his wealth nor his fashion would shield him from opprobrium and ostracism. I don't say that there are no Charterises at present; but they keep under cover. In the beginning of the present century the hackneycoachmen on the Piccadilly stand used to earn a handsome revenue by

VOL. XII.

H

letting out the roofs of their vehicles to amateurs, who, from those points of vantage, were able to take sly peeps at the orgies going on in the saloons of Queensberry House. "Old Q." (the estimable Duke who used to wear raw beefsteaks in his nightcaps to induce a rosy complexion, and whose Tokay, at the sale after his death, fetched a hundred guineas a dozen) did not care for concealment. En grand seigneur he was as naughty as ever he chose, and made an open parade of his naughtiness. He disdained even the demi-jour of Venetian blinds. He was wicked in the broad daylight; and when the shades of evening came, set his state chambers all a-blaze with light, that all London might be spectators of his scandalousness. But the existing generation would not tolerate "old Q." His goings-on would be voted mauvais ton. When he flourished, the town only laughed at the disgraceful stories about him. Now they would shudder and turn pale. As with a Queensberry, so with a Lord Baltimore. Sir Charles Hanbury Williams's coarse verses would fail to make him a favourite in Pall Mall. He would be probably expelled his club for ungentlemanly conduct. The spectacle of the Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan boozing over his bottle at Bellamy's, or reeling out of White's at three in the morning drunk, would not be regarded as a humorous spectacle. People would protest against the scandal created by such a "degraded creature." But it was not the fashion to be angry with such things in our grandmothers' days. If Mr. Pitt came tipsy into the house, or a fashionable countess compromised herself with the Prince Regent, or a marchioness was detected cheating at cards, the esclandre was deemed to have met with sufficient castigation if Mr. Gillray the caricaturist issued a coloured etching on the event from Mrs. Humphrey's shop in St. James's Street. Now that we are virtuous, and hide our heads behind the cupboard-door when we wish to indulge in cakes and ale, or are desirous that ginger should be hot in the mouth, Mr. Pitt's extra magnum, the countess's faux pas, and the marchioness's card-sharping, would be dilated upon in awfully indignant leaders in the penny papers. Go and look at Gillray's caricatures of "Wouski," of "Black Jack's delight," of "Faro's daughters," and you will see that dissipation the most flagrant and depravity the most inveterate were regarded in the good old times only as merry and convivial jests.

In two remarkable instances during the last century the absolutely hideous excesses of two ugly, eminent, unscrupulous men were pardoned by their contemporaries for the sake of their commanding genius and of the real usefulness to the interests of their country of which their tremendous mental attainments were productive. Our great-grandmothers were not, as has been hinted, squeamish; but they were for a time. frightened from their propriety by the well-nigh unutterable wickedness of Mr. Jack Wilkes. He was rather too much for a family nation. There was no question of straining at a gnat in his case. A whole drove of camels had to be swallowed if his moral turpitude was to be

overlooked. He was such an out-and-out blackguard. The exploits of the monks of Medmenham, the publication of the Essay on Woman, his gambling escapades, his duels, his debts, his impiety, and his crass debauchery, were as so many dead flies in the ointment of his undoubted wit, sagacity, and eloquence. But this irremediable vagabond was useful to his country. From scoundrelism (fully justifying in his person the Johnsonian dictum) he took refuge in patriotism; and as a patriot, not Hampden, not Pym, not Milton, not Sidney, not Russell-the mighty men of blameless lives-did their work better than this most flagitious Jack. Number forty-five of the North Britain covered a multitude of sins. That famous decision asserting the illegality of general warrants, which he was directly the means of procuring, wiped out the remembrance of his peccadilloes-thrice mille e tre as they were in number. The members of the honourable house, who had not refused to associate with Hanbury Williams, and who could remember when the prodigy of libertinism Wharton, and the scarcely less monstrous Bolingbroke, sat in the peers, could not stomach Jack Wilkes: at least they made the publication of his most foul and petty libel a stalking-horse for political animosity, and expelled him from amongst them. By the great ones of the earth, who led, as a rule, but very questionable lives, Wilkes was scouted; but it is not too much to say that for years he was the darling and almost the idol of the most respectable, decorous, church-going people in London. Respectability forgot all for the sake of number forty-five and the suppression of general warrants. They elected Jack Wilkes alderman; they elected him Lord Mayor; they painted his repulsive lineaments on sign-boards; and when he was old and broken, the corporation, true to its early love, and more grateful than corporations generally are, comfortably settled him down in the snug berth of Chamberlain to the City. Thus he made a good end of it; and let us hope that he purged, left off sack, and lived cleanly like a gentleman.

The dawn of the French Revolution offered, nearly a quarter of a century afterwards, a curiously parallel instance of unbounded moral worthlessness being pardoned for the sake of great public utility in a moment of dire emergency. Honoré Gabriel Riquetti, Count de Mirabeau, was to the full as witty as John Wilkes. In natural abilities, in mental culture, in eloquence, in political knowledge, he undeniably surpassed the English demagogue. He was even uglier than Wilkes, whose face, as etched by Hogarth, is that of Pan with a cast in his eye, who has laid down his pipes, and is about to utter an epigram. Mirabeau describes himself, doubtless with justice, as a "tiger marked with the smallpox." In depravity and cynicism the ex-monk of Medmenham was not fit to hold a candle to him. The Essay on Woman (it may be presumed from what sparse notices have come down to us, for there is every reason to believe that the real book is happily lost, and that the copies said to exist are only spurious catch-pennies) was dull and decorous in comparison with the Erotikon Biblion. Mirabeau absolutely made a living