acknowledge ourselves unable to take the measure of a common man's capacity. That it has so much in common with the pursuits of an engineer, as to justify the attempt to educate, even in part, the artillerist and the engineer together, appears to us to be a very untenable opinion. We are, therefore, strong advocates for a separate Engineer College, which, as well as the Artillery College, we should, as much as possible, feed from the preliminary school-encouraging youths to enter it who had exhibited special tastes for architecture, the application of steam-power, drawing, mechanics, geodesy, and topography. The school itself might advantageously be placed at Chatham, or wherever else the headquarters of the regiment of Royal Engineers are established, and the instruction should be as practical as the nature of the service seems to require. Besides plan - drawing and surveying, geology, hydrostatics and astronomy, the young engineer should be instructed in drawing and levelling lands, in the construction of viaducts, bridges, and docks, in the steamengine, in civil architecture, as well as in permanent and field fortification; in carpentry and mason's work; in mining and sapping; in metallurgy and projectiles. In a word, no art, the application of which is likely to be called for by armies in the field, or by the progress of civilisation at home, ought to be altogether a seal

ed book to him.

We do not see any necessity for carrying engineers into the arcana of high mathematics; but besides being rendered eminently practical, ready at every pinch with a remedy for the evil, they should be trained to command and manage men, a sort of lore which they will never learn, unless, after quitting school, they be attached at intervals to companies and battalions, and called upon to do duty with them. All young men making choice of the artillery and engineer services, whether passed out of the primary school or admitted after examination into the school of application from civil life.

ter as lieutenants with such rank to be confi

time allowed after th

pleted their course of training, and been appointed to do duty with their respective corps.

The course of the engineer school, like that of the artillery, should extend over two years, and there should be periodical examinations in both. We would assign the same limits to the staff school, the examination for admission into which ought to be strictly competitive; and in order to qualify officers for this, arrangements must be made for affording to them opportunities of study, while doing duty with their regiments, as well in the colonies as at home. Mr Sidney Herbert, in his speech of June 1856, has sufficiently explained how this is to be done. At the headquarters of every division, or at convenient places at home and abroad, officers of instruction should be stationed, who, by lectures and otherwise, may guide their comrades in their endeavours to render themselves accomplished soldiers. For it forms part of our plan that promotion shall not take place, from the junior to the senior ranks, without an examination; that such examination, besides being strictly professional, shall be conducted entirely upon paper; that the questions propounded by the central board in London, and circulated through the whole extent of the empire, shall be answered everywhere in the presence of a committee of staff officers, without any reference on the part of the candidates to books or notes, or even to hints or suggestions from men better instructed than themselves. We need scarcely enter more into the details of this scheme, which has been sufficiently discussed in the House of Commons and elsewhere. But we may observe, that after the machine is fairly launched, it ought to be exclusively to those whose papers in the division-schools had merited the highest marks of commendation, that the privilege of competing for ent into the staff school should Med

The numer staff school n upon the limit Faff service in ves would ex they should

nent of the depend igned to Ve our

not employed in regimental duty; including military secretaries, adjutant, and quarter-masters-general, majors of brigade, commandants, and professors at military colleges, divisional officers of instruction, and aides-decamp. A considerable inducement to professional study would thereby be held out to the whole army, even in time of peace; while for war we should be prepared, by having at our disposal a staff, not only well instructed, but numerous. Nor let it be said that for such posts as those of military secretary, major of brigade, and aide-de-camp, business habits, with personal activity, constitute qualifications sufficient. An aide-de-camp who is not so instructed as to understand the purpose of the order which he carries, a brigade major who is unable to help his brigade out of a military difficulty, and a military secretary whose opinion is worth nothing except in the diction of a letter, have no business to be employed with an army in the field, or to enjoy any special privileges in home quarters. To qualify for each of these situations, therefore, as well as for employment on the general staff, an officer ought to pass with credit through the staff school; and the school should be framed on such a scale as to undertake the education of at least one hundred students at a time.

In two years, divided into four terms, the course of this school should be completed. Five-andtwenty vacancies will thus occur at the close of every term, and officers, desirous of competing for the privilege of supplying them should appear before the board of military education, and have their acquirements tested. By-and-by, when our division-schools have come fully into operation, only the individuals who have most distinguished themselves at these will be summoned; but in the meanwhile the school should be open to all who may be disposed to undergo the ordeal of a sharp professional examination, and to try their strength with other competitors.

Into the detail of studies to be pured during these years of residence hool, it is not necessary to should include every

thing relating to the management and administration of armies; and not alone of armies in general, but of British armies in particular. Hence the museum should be rich in the appliances required to embark and disembark troops-in the models of boats, stages, pontoons, bridges, corduroy and other roads; in tents, huts, waggons, panniers, and hospital equipments. The topographical department should include well-executed maps of the seats of all the great wars of modern times; and the library should be furnished with military history, and treatises on tactics and strategy, in all languages. There should be professors of military drawing and surveying, of military administration, of artillery, engineering, cavalry and infantry manoeuvres; and a sufficient stud of horses should be at the command of the students, wherewith to execute military surveys with or without instruments.

Four examinations should take place between the commencement and the close of the course. To assist them in conducting these, the members of the board may be allowed to call in assessors; but they and they alone should undertake the responsibility of the issues. And a record being preserved of the places which the aspirants have taken on each occasion, individuals should be recommended for staff employment according to this order of merit. Meanwhile, to qualify for such employment, officers, on leaving the staff school, should be attached for one year to each arm of the service in which they had not previously served; and when appointed to the staff itself, they should become supernumerary in the regiments from which they had been taken. This would at once facilitate promotion in the army generally, and hinder the regimental duties which the staff officers ought to perform from being thrown upon their comrades. And the more to stimulate our young men to study, it would be well if, at the end of five years, every staff officer, with the exception of those at headquarters, should receive a step of rank, and return to regimental duty. If there be no vacancy in

might venture for a morning's trip, and come back to dinner, without committing yourself to her Majesty's service, I might have ventured; but knowing it a sea without visible shores, and with a wholesome fear of press-gangs in crinoline, and female literal Ironsides not quite of Cromwell's kind, I prefer the dry land, owning myself deficient in the necessary hardihood. I put aside the arguments from Holy Writ about the dissolubility or indissolubility of marriage. Such are questions for divines rather than dilettanti. At all events, I am quite satisfied that marriage is not a state into which dissolute people ought to enter, at least without a firm resolution to be dissolute no longer. On the whole, though I have not read the bill, Í am sure it means mischief. You are too gallant a man to tell me that this is rather a ladylike way of treating the subject. But I should like for you and me to put our sage heads together, and concoct a divorce bill such as it ought to be. Of course, the legislation of Parliament, unaided by a ladies' committee, must be one-sided and unfair in this matter. The ladies would project, as causes of divorce, it is impossible to say what frivolous things, the possession of a latch-key, smoking in the conjugal residence, belonging to a club, napping after dinner, asking friends without notice given and leave obtained, Free-masonry and Odd-fellowship, indifference to the beauty of babies, &c. &c. The gentlemen would add to these, renunciation of accomplishments, dowdiness, cold dinners with servants' godliness for excuse, and even such slight offences as constant repetition of the same logical proposition, a shrill tone, Brepholatry (this word, ladyreaders, is as good as telegram; it means, exaggerated worship of a small household Llama, generally the last in order of arrival).

Allowing both of these classes as causes of divorce, marriage would be impossible as a permanent institution; allowing, on the other hand, such causes only as both men and women would agree upon, things would remain much as they are. Divorce is possible now,

but very

select indeed. Repudiation for the million will never do. Saturdaynight wife-beaters would be divorced on Monday as regularly as Monday came, and re-married as regularly the next Sunday three weeks. The wives want Protection and not Free Trade. And I should be sorry to see the myth, so devoutly believed in by our friends on the other side of the Channel, of Smithfield and its wife-market, made true in fact. The whole question is nugatory. But a certain potentate will find mischief for idle Whigs to do, and this in times, above all others, when the helmsman of the State ought to be at his post and wide awake.

That Mutiny is truly an awful business. The classics would have seen in it the hand of Nemesis. We see more. We seek quarrels with Persia and China, and we find a quarrel in India not of our seeking. Yet more. I believe in the justice and necessity of the Russian War. Just it was, because Russia was robbing, and it was the duty of the powers that keep the peace of the world to stop her; it was necessary, because the success of Russia would have upset the balance of power, and blocked up the highway to the East. But these were not the reasons why the war was generally popular: it was believed to be the opportunity of the revolutionary party. Now was the time for all oppressed nationalities to rise. The oppressed nationalities rose not, but pampered and petted nationalities rose on us the speakers of these idle words, and made us rue them. Then, again, there was some diplomatic cant about the maintenance of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. What is the Ottoman Empire to us? Time was when it was an abomination to all Christendom. And now the Mussulman has risen against us in India, though the Sultan, in his private generosity, sends a thousand pounds to the Indian sufferers. The same religionists perpetrated the massacre of Scio who perpetrate the massacres of Delhi and Cawnpore.

wi

But this heart-rending mutiny national good. The was sharp but short. ished there by heca

tombs, because preparedness for war was not considered the habitual duty of a nation's life. The Indian Mutiny reads us the same lesson in larger letters, even in the shattering of our household gods, the desecration of our wives and maidens. Who but a nation thinking too lightly of its military duties would have placed such implicit confidence in a mercenary army? The only similar instance that I recollect, is the mutiny of the mercenaries of Carthage recorded by Polybius, which brought that state to the brink of ruin. That state blindly stuck to the system notwithstanding, until its eyes were rudely opened by the Scipios. Sadly does the soft place in our character want annealing. Men were becoming indifferent to wickedness. It was but a curable form of mental disease. None but idiots pule about mercy now. George Fox the Quaker, himself, had he lived now, would have petitioned for a hangman's place, regretting that he could only kill. Not to kill in such cases as the present would be a crime. God's earth must not be polluted for one unnecessary moment. But for our own sakes, we cannot torture, although our instinct suggests impalement and tearing by wild horses. We must put to death, and leave the real punishment to other powers. It is hard to believe how bad or how good man may be.

Here we have Nana Sahib, the ever accursed through dominions on which the sun never sets; there we have the gallant Havelock, our British Joshua, said to be descended from the Danish Vikings. Here we have the cowardly legions of worse than Canaanites, strong only in lust, rapine, and murder, and timid as hares in fight; there the sacred band of God-fearing sons of the north, the noble Highlanders, driving them like chaff before the wind, and only thinned by heat and pestilence. If this Indian mutiny has unsealed the blackness of a bottomless pit of villany, it has also brought to light a strange diamondmine of human heroism. Think of Ale chaplain of the Church of Engf Cawnpore, reading the serburial of the dead to his

in momentary expec

tation of the volley which was to slay them all!

How can any sane man doubt of the ultimate issue? We shall be stronger than ever in India. But the question of its future government will arise. I should certainly like to see Queen Victoria also Empress of Hindostan. But her present advisers would turn the great golden opportunity of doing good into a gigantic job. "Remember Dowb." When were the Whigs ever false to their bedraggled colours?

Some may still presume that, with all its shortcomings, Leadenhall Street may be able to govern India better than Downing Street. We could not get through the Crimean war without insulting Canada in her noble offer of assistance; and as yet the Prime Minister has to prove his capacity to govern, by electric telegraph, 200,000,000 of people on the other side of the world. What a mercy it is that the Russian war and the Persian war were over when this mutiny broke out! The mutineers would have preferred that our hands should be as full as possible. And what a mercy it is that they were idiots enough to revolt before they had generally obtained possession of that tremendous arm, the Enfield rifle, and on a question of the cartridges to be employed in its use! The men of peace talk about division of labour. Every man cannot be a soldier; they have not time for military exercises; why not pay soldiers to fight for them? Indeed, why not? Why not buy a machine, like that of the priests of Tibet, to say their prayers for them? Is there no other personal duty which might be done by proxy in the same way?

A speaker in Parliament quotes authority as to the discipline of the Bengal army, to the effect that it was the custom for the individuals of the guard who were not actually standing sentry, to pile their arms, "divest themselves of every article of clothing," and go to sleep. This seems the normal state of John Bull when not actually fighting. After a great war comes a great disarmament, and John makes himself comfortable, and nods off till he is awakened by some distant thunder-clap. What we im

peratively need for the preservation of our Empire, is a really military spirit in our population-not a vainglorious love of mere soldiering, but a fixed idea that war is as much a part of every man's duty as prayer. A complication of contingencies might have arisen, in which every man in Great Britain must have turned soldier for the defence of the country, whether he liked it or not. I wish the Times would take up and keep up this question. It is of no use to take up a subject one year, and let it drop the next. One year the Times ran a-muck at the hotels: the landlords put their heads together, and bowed before the storm for a while, but now they are erect as ever. In Wales, at any rate, the bad old system prevails. A dun knows that incessant dunning alone will secure payment from a spendthrift. A man of original character once asked a crossing-sweeper why he always touched his hat to him, seeing that he never gave him a halfpenny. Broom replied, "You never have, sir; but you will," and of course got sixpence. This is why I am always harping, in a manner to you perhaps tiresome, on the harsh note of the necessity for a general armament of Great Britain even in times of peace. I would arm Irene like Minerva, lance in hand, and sword by side, at tended by the bird of wakefulness, and set up her statue on the white cliffs of Britain.

The Athenians of old confided the security of their city to the goddess of Wisdom, War, and Watchfulness, and fell only when they lost sight of the inseparableness of her attributes. Under the shadow of her protection, there was abundant room for commerce and the fine arts to flourish; but the temple of Athene Polias ever stood on the height of the Acropolis, that all men might see it, and read the lessons which were written on the lucent tables of its immortal marble.

I suppose it is with you as it is with me; the Indian mutinies fill my dreams with horror, even when I can chase them from my waking thoughts. While avowing my indignation against the maudlin humanity that would show mercy in such a case,

or blunt for one-eighth of an inch the sword of the destroying angel, they impress vividly on my feelings the utterly detestable nature of all cruelty, and even careless infliction of suffering. What holds good in the case of man, holds good also in the case of the inferior creation. I have often defended field - sports. As war is noble and justifiable under certain circumstances, and it is lawful for man to destroy his neighbour, so is it lawful for him to slay the beasts of the field for his maintenance-nay, even for his healthful recreation. But it is not lawful to give any of them one instant of unnecessary pain. The death that a partridge dies, when shot through the head, is a more painless one than the death of nature. But when a bird is unfortunately wounded, it suffers terror, and pain, and the sportsman's first care should be to put it out of suffering. I believe that you always make a point of knocking your trout on the head as soon as you take them, while another friend of mine says that he likes the sensation of the fish leaping in his basket; and when the fish are rising fast, it seems to be waste of time to stop to kill them. But if you observe the trout which die of simply being taken out of the water, you will see that they have died with their mouths open, gasping and in mortal agony. This ought to be quite sufficient to teach a merciful man the proper course. It is not, as I believe has been abundantly proved, the hook in the lip or gills that gives the fish pain, but the being removed from the element necessary to its existence.

To jump from small things back again to great, a gentleman has addressed a letter to the Spectator, advocating the exhibition, in perpetuity, of the monster Nana Sahib (if we catch him), as a human specimen of a Bengal tiger, in the Tower or elsewhere. I should especially reprobate such a proceeding. After passing a certain line, a human being has put himself out of the pale of human pardon or mercy. We have no right to keep him alive, and we have, at the same time, no right to put him to an instant's useless pain. No ends of justice can be served thereby-no end can be served