motives of fear, and shame, and ambition, and the sense of honor by which it is sought to be strengthened and pampered, is often, after all, found wholly inadequate to counteract what is indeed a real instinct - the disposition to escape from that which threatens injury or destruction to our life. At any rate, the inclination to flee from danger is, in a very large proportion of men at least, we believe in all men, a natural instinct; and if every instinct must be regarded as a “revelation from heaven," why should not men be allowed to obey that instinct? 2. But we deny that, even if the disposition "to strike out" were an instinct, that it would be wise or safe to follow it. It may happen, it often has, that instinct may utterly mistake as to the character, nay, as to the very existence, of the apprehended agency which it fears, and may, instead of averting, only provoke danger. We have read of two brothers encountering each other in the dark, and, under the cowardly terror dignified with the name of instinct, beginning to "strike out," until they had belabored each other within an inch of their lives. Did they do this in obedience to "a revelation from heaven ?" It was but the other day that the newspapers told us of a clergyman hearing the noise of an approaching footstep "in the dark" outside of his house, and acting on the instinct to "strike out," discharged his pistol in the direction of the apprehended peri!, and in the morning had the satisfaction to find that he had shot dead a poor old farmer, one of his own parishioners, who was returning home from market a little the worse for liquor, and had so wandered out of his way. We were told that this pistol-keeping clergyman was very much distressed when he found what he had done. But it is evident he had a morbid conscience; for why need he afflict his soul for obeying an "instinct which as manifestly came from God as any truth of revelation ?" 3. But we deny that we are at liberty implicitly to obey our instincts, even though we had a far greater certainty than we could have in this case of safety or advantage from such obedience. On this point we are at one with Bishop Butler, whose words we subjoin:—“Mankind have various instincts and principles of action, as brute creatures have. Brutes obey these instincts or principles of action, according to certain rules - suppose the constitution of their body, and the objects around them. Brutes, in acting according to these rules, act suitably to their whole nature. Mankind, also, in acting thus, would act suitably to their whole nature, if no more were to be said of man's nature than what has now been said, if that, as it is a true, were also a complete, adequate account of our nature. But that is not a complete account of man's nature; somewhat further must be brought in to give us an adequate notion of it, namely, that another principle of action, that is, conscience or reflection, is to be found there, and that this, compared with the rest, as they all stand together in the nature of man, plainly bears upon it marks of authority over all the rest, and claims the absolute direction of them all to allow or forbid their gratification. Lond. Her. of Peace. CONSCRIPTION IN FRANCE. This military lottery occurs once every year. The annual contingent of troops levied thereby, varies according to the necessities of the state, being in war-times very high, and in quiet, peaceable times comparatively low; at all times, however, it amounts to at least 20,000 men, that being the number who annually receive their conge, their term of service having expired. In order fairly to get at the contingent, a census of all the departments is taken every five years; and the number of men required, is divided in equal proportions among all the provinces, arrondissements, cantons, and communes of the empire. Immediately after the census has been taken, the names of all the young men between the ages of twenty and thirty, both years inclusive, are described on the conscription lists of their respective localities, and every attempt to evade this conscription by removing to a distant place of residence, or by any other subterfuge, is punished by an imprisonment of from one month to one year, whilst any one aiding or abetting a fugitive from the dreaded ballot, is liable to the same penalty. as The scene which takes place at the drawing, is one of much picturesque animation. Groups of the finest youths of a wide neighborhood, with generally their fathers and mothers, relatives and friends, are sembled in the spacious hall of the town-house. The mayors, prefects and sub-prefects of the environing cantons and communes, are there to receive them, with usually several officers quartered in the district. On every face among the involuntary candidates for military service, as well as those of their attendants, there is an expression of hope and fear, anxiety and excitement; and, as each advances towards the fatal urn, as towards an oracle of Epidaurus, containing his future destiny, all the spectators, as well as the parties immediately concerned, feel the most lively interest in the lottery. The result of the whole agitating ceremony is, that those who draw a higher number than the number of recruits required, are exempt for life from any obligation to become soldiers, whilst those who draw a lower number are condemned to serve their country as militaires for the space of seven years. There are certain exceptions to the universality of the conscription. These exceptions include all below the standard height of five feet five inches; all criminals; all who are the subject of any physical incapacity; the eldest of orphans; the only son, or eldest son, or grandson of a widow, or of a father seventy years of age; certain classes of students in the public schools, including all those who have carried off the great prizes of the institute, or of the university. With such exemptions, none are exempt from the ballot; all must appear and draw their lots; and after this ceremony is over, such as have objections to urge, are at liberty to send them in to the council of revision, which is appointed for the express purpose of taking these objections into consideration, and of examining generally into the validity of the conscript returns. Were it not for this close examination, many would, under false pretexts, evade the common national responsibility, and some would intrude themselves into the service, whom the service would otherwise reject. As it is, the instances are numerous of persons who mutilate themselves by chopping off a finger, or who raise sores on their bodies by piercing their flesh, and drawing strings through the wound, that they may be reported by the medical inspectors infirm, and unfit for military life. The whole effective organization of the French army, in all its details, arises out of this one institution. There is danger of its abuse. During the latter part of Napoleon's reign, the conscription was felt to be an intolerable grievance. There was then such an incessant drain on the country for men, cannon-flesh, as they were called, that there was hardly a family in France that had not to deplore the loss of sons or brothers. The whole land might be said to be in mourning, and the national glories, even before they were darkened with reverses, brought domestic grief to every hearth. Then it was that conscripts, fleeing from the ballott, or making their escape after being duly passed, might be seen in groups, handcuffed, and with ropes around their necks, dragged forward by military police to join their regiments. A year or two after the battle of Waterloo, making a pedestrian tour through some of the southern provinces of France, we recollect being struck with the fact that there was not a young man between the ages of twenty and thirty-five to be seen! There were boys, a few middle-aged, many old men ; but the whole track we traversed, seemed to be depopulated of its youthful manhood. United (Eng.) Serv. Mag. 244 The Moral Recoil of Indian Conflict on England. [April, MORAL RECOIL OF INDIAN CONFLICT ON ENGLAND. PERHAPS there is nothing that so surely corrupts the virtue of a people, as to be obliged, for what they deem their own honor, to justify and applaud deeds which it is impossible they can in their hearts approve. The inevitable result of such tampering with conscience, will be to blunt its perceptions, until by degrees, those who accustom themselves hardly to "call evil good, and good evil, to put darkness for light, and light for darkness" for their own convenience, will grow in time to see those distinctions less clearly, and will end ultimately by believing their own lie. This is what we have been doing for the last century in our relations with the East. It is impossible for us to disguise from ourselves, that we have been constantly called upon to apologise for deeds done in our name and for our advantage, which, if they had been done by any other nation, would have met with unhesitating and unanimous condemnation on our part. The constant policy of aggression remorselessly carried on by combined cunning and violence; the plunder of Indian provinces; wars like those carried on in Affghanistan, in Scinde, in Burmah, in Persia, in China; annexations like those of Sattara and Oude; a traffic like that in opium; punishments so sweeping and ferocious as those inflicted on the Indian mutineers is there any man amongst us who doubts that, if such things had been told us of Russia, France, or America, we should have poured upon their heads our indignant execration? Again, is it credible that, but for the gradual brutalization we have undergone, English men and women could have contemplated such deeds, and listened to such language, as they have been familiar with in connection with India during the last eighteen months, not only without disgust, but with complacency and approval? If we had been told a few years ago that Englishmen would ever do such things as they are now daily doing in India, would we not emphatically have exclaimed, "Are thy servants dogs, that they should do such things ?" Would we have believed that a British officer, before hanging a Hindoo, would compel him to lick blood, in order that he might die with the conviction that his soul was eternally lost? Would we have believed that another British officer would have shot two unarmed Indian princes, after inducing them to surrender under promise of sparing their lives? Would we have believed that another British officer would be found hanging his prisoners of war with his own hands? Would we have believed that a Christian Englishman would have massacred in cold blood 500 unarmed men, whose only offence was a desperate attempt to escape from what they believed was a fixed intention to destroy them? Would we have believed that a countryman of ours, even though nothing higher than a common soldier, in writing home to his mother, could have gloated over such horrible atrocities as these: :- "There was a gateway by which we had to leave, that was completely crammed with dead and dying. Here might be seen Sikhs murdering the wounded men, and then setting fire to them as they lay bleeding. Oh! mother, sweet, sweet, was this revenge; 1 gloried in seeing it, although my heart turned and made me sick at the time with the smell of the roasting dead and dying." Are not these indications of the frightful extent to which our countrymen in the East are becoming demoralized and de-humanized by the spectacles they have to witness, and the deeds they have to perform? "I had to see everything done myself, even to the adjusting of the ropes, and saw them looped to run easy."-"I took on my own shoulders the responsibility of hanging them first, and asking leave to do so afterwards."-Extracts from officers' letters in the Times, But even those who are not engaged as actors in the worst part of Eastern life, become somehow almost invariably corrupted, in a more or less degree, by the unhealthy moral atmosphere they breathe. It is difficult to meet a man, whatever may be his calling, who has resided for a considerable number of years in India or China, who does not exhibit symptoms that he has suffered in conscience, as well as constitution, by a climate which seems as unfavorable to the moral as it is to the physical health of our countrymen. In the absence of all lofty public opinion, they learn to look, first with tolerance, then with connivance, and at last with almost approval, upon sentiments and practices, from which, before they left England, they would have shrunk with unqualified abhorrence. We have had some painful illustrations of this lately in the effect produced even upon ministers and missionaries by their Oriental sojourn. Mr. Russell, the correspondent of the Times, alluding to the ferocious temper generally exhibited by the Anglo-Indian population, speaks thus: "It is not in this or that instance that we detect the existence of that most vindictive, unchristian and cruel spirit which the dreadful contest and the crimes of the mutineers have evoked. It is in the press, in the countinghouse, I regret to say, in the pulpit. One reverend divine has written a book, in which, forgetting that the heart of man is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked, he takes the cheerful view that the Oriental nature is utterly diabolical and hopelessly depraved, as contradistinguished from his own nature and that of his fellows. The reverend doctor apparently forgets, also, in what part of the world God planted his favored race, and gave his revelations, though indeed it appears to be imbued rather with the teaching of those who smote hip and thigh, even from the rising to the setting of the sun, than of Him who told his servants to put up their sword. I know, indeed, that an excellent clergyman at Simla took occasion the other day, in his sermon, to rebuke this disposition on the part of certain of his hearers to ill-use the natives; but generally the voice from the pulpit has been mute on the matter, or it has called aloud, 'Go forth and spare not."" Even the limes correspondent in China during the late hostilities, though one of the most unscrupulous writers we have met with for a long time, was shocked and scandalize l at the talk of the missionaries with whom he came in contact there the manner in which they defended war with arguments drawn from infidel writers, and vindicated and encouraged the bloody atrocities enacted by the Chinese insurgents upon their countrymen. "Amid the outpourings," says he, "of blood, in famine and pestilence, in the wreck of all the physical good which antiquity has wrought, our missionaries think they see a safe hope for the religion of the Bible. With all allowance for their strongly militant position, it is hard to understand how so faint and indefinite a hope can blind their eyes and deafen their ears to the material woes which this rebellion has produced. Yet we have men who have gone among them in the same spirit as Samuel went to Saul, and who have produced scandal, even among their own body, by urging these ruffians to go forth and kill. I have objected to the missionaries, the material miseries the insurrection has caused; and they have quoted against me Cousin's Defence of War, which is no other than that war is in itself a good, and that the abridgement of longevity is not necessarily an evil. When I reply that this is all that could be said by an infidel philosopher against a certain article in the Decalogue, they have replied that, notwithstanding this commandment, the Israelites were enjoined to exterminate the Canaanites. I reply that to establish an analogy, between the cases, it will be necessary to admit Taepingwang's pretensions to direct personal intercourse with God the Father. No missionary is prepared for his admission, and our argument closes." Now, all this cannot fail to re-act, and is re-acting most perniciously, upon the moral character of the nation at home. Is there not some ground for the fear, that a terrible retribution is gradually overtaking us for our conduct in the East, in what is worse, infinitely worse, than any loss of territory, or political and military prestige — the gradual corruption of the national conscience through familiarity with evil by that process described so graphically by the poet in reference to an individual: "Vice is a monster of such hideous mien, Lond. Her. of Peace. All this, and even more, is true of the British proceedings in India. The effect is to demoralize the general mind, not only of England, but of all Christendom, and to throw obstacles, which ages cannot remove, in the way of converting the heathen to the gospel in its purity and saving power. The mass of Christians are unaware and quite incredulous of such a state; and for this very reason it is likely to be more fatal and lasting. GEN. HAVELOCK AND THE AFFGHAN WAR. When the proclamation of the Affghan war was issued by Lord Auckland, the English in India, habituated as they are to scenes of unjust aggression on native rights and territories, and far from being over-sensitive on these points, yet even they were shocked and scandalized at this. "The press," says Mr. Kaye, in his History of the War, " seized upon it, and tore it to pieces. If it were not pronounced to be a collection of absolute falsehoods, it was described as a most disingenuous distortion of the truth. In India every war is more or less popular; but many who rejoiced in the prospect before them, wished that they were about to draw their swords in a better cause.' It does not appear that Gen. Havelock ever expressed any disapprobation of it, or felt any compunction in entering himself on a war which even the reckless young officers of the Indian army acknowledged to be unjust. It is not our place to judge him for this; but we deem it a duty to express. the deep conviction we entertain, that those who are holding up Gen. Havelock as a model for admiration and imitation, and " every inch a Christian," are doing irreparable injury to Christianity, and losing sight of one of its most blessed attributes, Peace, which the world, and even the religious world, has not (to use Sir T. F. Buxton's words) nearly enough striven after. That Havelock could feel for the miseries produced by war is attested by the following description from his own pen: "The scene now excited feelings of horror, mingled with compassion, as one by one, the Affghans sunk under repeated wounds upon the ground, which was strewed with bleeding, mangled, convulsed and heaving carcasses. Here were ghastly figures stiffly stretched in calm but grim repose; here the last breath was yielded up through clenched teeth, in attitudes of despair and defiance, with hard struggles and muttered exclamations; and there a faint Ue Ullah (O God) addressed half in devotion to God, half in the way of entreaty to man, alone testified that the mangled sufferer yet lived. The clothes of some of the dead and dying near the entrance had caught fire, and in addition to the agony of their wounds, some were enduring thsin rture of being burnt by the slow fire of thickly-wadded vests, and ged and hardened coats of sheep skin." |