fine; and to allow no substitutes, on account of the enormous rise of bounties which would otherwise be occasioned. But, to prevent the injurious confusion of classes, which would take place if personal service were rigorously insisted upon, the party should be allowed to retire on paying a sum of such magnitude as would discourage the having recourse to it except in very strong cases. A small bounty would be offered to volunteers; and it was hoped that many Volunteer corps would change the terms of their engagement, and become Local Militia; a service which would have the advantage of requiring no stock-purse. The deficiency of volunteers was to be made up by the ballot, limited to persons between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. With respect to the qualification of officers, a thing highly important, the regulations of the militia should be adopted. No qualification was required for subalterns. There was a latitude given for captains, if qualified persons could not be found, and it was proposed that retired field-officers of the line should be eligible. The term of engagement should be four years; and it was not intended to debar the men from enlisting in the regular army or regular militia at pleasure, during the latter part of that term. Mr Windham, whose military plans were always, directly or indirectly, attacked by his successor, objected to the proposed measure. Lord Castlereagh, he said, had set out with undermining the system of limited service, and now he was about to introduce a bill for the purpose of destroying the Training Act, under which, with far less expence to the country, and inconvenience to them selves, men would learn so much of the military exercise as to enable them to become effective soldiers in as short a time as they would do under this complicated and burthensome system. The great motive for all these freaks and whims, and complicated machinery, was a taste,— an appetite, a passion,-a rage for getting soldiers for life. This was the great principle which set the machine in motion;-but there was another on which its movement in no small degree depended,-that of opening a source of patronage and influence. With the Training Bill there was not a single job connected; it had no other object than the good of the nation, and providing for old soldiers, who could make no return to those who provided for them. But here they were to have a regimented force. When there were regiments there must be officers; and every grant of that kind was matter of favour. These argu ments he enforced again upon the second reading of the bill. The proposed measure, he said, would be attended with vast expence, with a general disturbance of the occupations of private life, patronage without end, and a great contamination of public morals. It was a bulky measure; but what was its substantial size? what would the tinsel burn for? what weight of solid gold did it contain? We were told of half a million of men in arms, but we had the men and the arms before: and the enrolling was provided for by the Training Act to the amount of 200,000 men, or more, if necessary. The training was to have been for twenty-four days, now it was to be for twenty-eight, and the men were to be incorporated into companies, regiments, and battalions; this was, -- May 2. in fact, the main point of difference, and this was a loss instead of a gain: and, even if it was a gain, it would be too dearly purchased at the expence of all the money, vexation, patronage, and corruption that would attend it. The Noble Lord thought he did a great deal when he made a great bustle; or rather he wished to appear to do something, and for that purpose set about undoing what was already done. The plan upon which he himself had acted had been to increase the army, by rendering the condition of the soldier attractive to the respectable population. Lord Castlereagh proceeded, not by raising the situation of the soldier to the condition of the people, but by debasing the people to the level of the soldier. It was an oppressive feature of the present bill, that it prevented the alleviation of the burthen by insurance; for, besides the bad effects of a month's licence, under officers having no controul, many persons, who had nobody to attend to their daily business in their absence, would be ruined. If the bill were allowed to operate in its present state, thousands must be crushed under it like grubs; and all this mischief was to be incurred for the sake of indulging Lord Castlereagh in an army of red-coats! He left the House and the Country to consider, whether the Noble Lord's dressed soldiers, with their military coats and breeches, their red, white, and blue facings, their feathers and their bands of music, had at such expence, and with so much vexation, with the disturbance of the occupations and the injury of the morals of the people, and with the unlimited patronage annexed,-whether this was to be preferred to his system of training, which, without any derangement of industrious occupations and moral habits, rendered the men equally effective. Colonel Shipley and Mr Whitbread severely censured the bill for the cruelty of its operation, and the ruinous effects which it must needs produce upon the morals of the country. It was opposed by Sir Francis Burdett in the most remarkable speech which he ever pronounced in parliament. Mr Herbert of Kerry, who preceded him, had praised the plan, as being worthy of the Noble Lord in whom it originated. Alluding to this, Sir Francis began by saying, that the Noble Lord was indeed the fittest person to originate such a measure; but was the Honourable Gentleman, who complimented him for bringing it forward, aware of what that measure would render the people subject to? In times when the army was undisciplined, and the nation barbarous, when social order was trampled under foot, and liberty was but another name for licentiousness,-in such times it might have been right to enact and to enforce that military code, the penalties of which were now the exclusive disgrace of the British army and the British nation. But when so great an amelioration had taken place in the discipline and composition of our military force, it was no longer excusable to continue those penal enactments. To a conscription, in the full force of the word, he should not object: it never could be considered a hardship to a man to be called forth to defend his home and his country, or to qualify himself for that necessity. It was not, therefore, on that account that he objected to the measure; but before he could consent to subject the British people to any general sum mons of this nature, he would call for an amendment in the military code. He could not give his consent to commit the whole people of England to what was dishonourable and pernicious to the army itself; he never could allow them to be subject to the lash. Then, bursting into a strain of the bitterest personality, he could not, he said, describe the indignation which he felt at beholding the Minister of the day dare to stigmatize the Representatives of the People, by offering such a measure for their adoption! It required audacity to propose what only folly could imagine efficient, that the reluctant conscripts of our oppressed population should be marshalled under the scourge of tyranny, and presented to the nation as her defence. When you want men for your defence, offer them a post fit for men to accept; when you propose a military code, let it be fit for Englishmen and freemen. What! did the Noble Lord suppose that the people would endure and bend beneath the sanguinary, remorseless, and ferocious despotism, which even slaves would turn upon? Did he suppose that the lash of tyranny,-the insults, the contumely, and scorn of overweening power, the foedum signum servitutis, would be suffered by a free people with impunity? It was, however, in this part of the measure that the fitness of the Noble Lord to be its proposer was particularly shown. The features of the offspring intuitively bespake the parent, as with the appearance of the fasces must be associated the idea of the lictor. Atrocious measures must be expected in age from him, whose youth had been familiarised to executions; and when the author of this bill bad wrung the heart-strings of his own country, little delicacy could be expected from him for the dignified feelings of another. Experience had shown that he was the fittest man in the world to submit a whole people to the lash. The French government has now under its controul nearly an hundred millions of people. It has the command of all the ports of the Continent, and may soon have.fleets equal at least in numbers to ours. In these circumstances, this country cannot rest its safety on any thing but an armed population. The British nation should be in a state to feel no alarm, even if it had not a ship upon the sea; but the British nation must not be given up to military law. When individual soldiers voluntarily sold themselves into that situation, it was a sufficient disgrace to the country which permitted such an abuse; but it was not to be borne that the people should be brought into that condition by compulsory enactment. True, indeed, the constitution placed every man at the King's disposal, to resist the enemy in case of invasion. This was as it should be; what he wished was, by the abolishment of the disgraceful penalties attached to the condition of a British soldier, to make the situation such as a British freeman might fitly be placed in. He therefore besought his Majesty's ministers to be cautious how they proposed measures of general defence, clogged with obligations dishonourable to any nation, and especially inconsistent with the characteristic and constitutional freedom of Britons. The time may come when Britain must depend for her safety and liberty upon the discipline, valour, and spirit of her natives. Is it supposed that coercive measures will provide for such an event? If so, vain is the supposition:-the salvation of the country depends on the unanimity of the people, and that unanimity can only be produced by conciliation; from that cause alone shall we be able to date our prosperity. But, alas! said he, let me not talk of our prosperity!We have nothing among us like those great principles by which a lone nations can flourish, and from which no nation ever departed without involving its own ruin. Every thing that is done by the British government indicates that it is hastening to its fate-every thing that I see in this unhappy land, assures me of its downfall! Each succeeding year produces a change of ministry, and each change of ministry a change of measures; the indecision of one set of men contrasted by the blind obstinacy of the next, and both out done by the nick-named vigour of the following! Distraction in our councils, and impotence in our ministers; while military executioners are daring to fix the badge of servitude on the people. Sir Francis Burdett has seldom spoken so eloquently, or so well, as on this occasion; the purport and principle of his speech were excellent, but its temper was injudicious and indefensible. It is not more impossible to unite a people by coercion, than it is to convince an opponent by exasperating him. It was asserted in reply by Colonel Wood, that our military code was the most lenient in Europe; and Mr Whitbread, who wished to avoid the discussion on this occasion, said he had always believed the English were good and humane officers, and that they mitigated, by their moderation and lenity, the rigour of the law: but this was in fact admitting, that the law required mitigation; and the discus sion, however intemperately handled, was strictly to the question. Lord Castlereagh, with meritorious command of temper, contented himself by saying, that the observations of the Honourable Baronet did not detract much from the merit of the proposed plan; and he hoped the good sense of the country would se cure them from giving in to his opinion respecting the degradation of the military service. Subsequent events have made one part of his Lordship's speech worthy of notice. In speaking of the danger of invasion, he said the enemy had formerly brought down his troops to Boulogne, and from thence alone had threatened us with an attack; but he was now possessed of the port of Flushing, and that was a point from which he might severely annoy us, and against which it behoved us to be particularly and adequately prepared. In the progress of the bill, some objectionable parts of its detail were amended. On the motion of Sir W. W. Wynn, persons above thirty were exemptMay 18. ed from the ballot; and on that of his brother, Mr C. W. Williams Wynn, those who had three children. These were important improvements. Sir John Cox Hippesley proposed an exemption for all young men engaged in education for holy orders; but it was replied, that the mischief which would result from thus opening a door to abuses, would far over-balance any inconvenience that could arise from leav ing the matter as it stood. A clause in the bill exempted all dissenting clergymen not carrying on any other trade. This, it was observed by Mr William Smith, would be peculiarly hard upon the Baptist teachers, who had in many instances so little salary, that they became booksellers or stationers, being however really clergymen; he therefore proposed an amendment to remedy this inconvenience. But Lord Castlereagh objected, that nothing was more usual than for masons, bricklayers, and other handicraftsmen, to set up for spiritual teachers, and the clause now proposed would most erroneously include these unworthy objects within its provision. This, however, might easily have been obviated. The Baptist ministers being not only a highly respectable, but also a welleducated set of men, there could have been little difficulty in devising a benefit of clergy, which would have distinguished between the learned and the ignorant. The clause which prohibited insurance, and required persons who paid the fine to sign a declaration, that it was not paid any otherwise than with their own property, was strongly opposed. Lord Castlereagh assented to June 3. a suggestion of Mr Davies Giddy, that parents should be allowed to pay for their sons, and masters for their apprentices or servants: but it was insisted that the prohibition of insurance was absolutely essential to render the bill effectual. On the last reading of the bill, Sir Francis Burdett renewed his objections to it both as oppressive and unconstitutional. It was at once, he said, burthensome and ineffectual; harassing to the subject, and completely impotent as a measure of national defence. It ought rather to be called a bill of pains and penalties, than a bill for the defence of the country; as it contained not less than eleven penalties! The condition of the people, upon whom the existing taxes already bore too heavily, would be rendered much worse by this oppressive measure. But the Noble Lord seemed to act upon the principle of "Evil, be thou my Good!" He had altered the system of Mr Windham, which must, in its natural tendency, have considerably added to the eligibility of a soldier's life; and he now proposed to pervert the character and habits of the British people at large, and subject them to the lash, a practice detrimental to the service itself, and as such wholly exploded in the French armies. If such a system was to be carried into execution,-if the poisoned cup was to be coolly administered to the lips of Englishmen,-it was fit that it should be furnished by the self-same person who had viewed with coldness the scenes which were witnessed in Ireland. A delicate word might sometimes be used to express a barbarous action; and, in this light, the delicate term discipline might be used to convey an idea of lacerating men's backs, of tearing, by means of the scourge, the live-flesh off men's bones. This is by some called flogging, said Sir Francis,—and, if the Noble Lord, through delicacy, calls it discipline, 1 have only to wish that he may keep his delicate hands off the backs of Englishmen. It is probable that the manner in which Sir Francis Burdett advanced his opinions deterred many persons from supporting him. Unquestionably it was a fair and weighty objec tion to the bill, that it subjected men by compulsion to a system of laws, which even those who contend for its necessity must admit to be severe and cruel. The Marquis of Buck |