As a regimental officer of long experience, not only at home and abroad, but also in the field; as a staff officer during the greater part of the Peninsular war; and with the army of occupation in France, and in other parts of the world, I unhesitatingly declare, that corporal punishment as now inflicted in the army, cannot be dispensed with, but at the risk of the total subversion of all discipline: indeed the hampering commanding officers in this respect, as has been the fashion of late years; and its being fancied, or pretended, that he is the best commander of a regiment, who returns the smallest number of soldiers punished, is, to say the least, very impolitic, and most injurious to the interests of the army; for crimes which should have called for punishment, must in consequence have been passed over, or so inadequately visited upon the offenders, that other men could not have been deterred from being guilty of similar conduct, and the effects of this, I fear, must in the end be dangerous; for what we frequently hear of and read respecting military punishments, in some of the newspapers, can scarcely, when coupled with an unavoidably relaxed state of discipline, be expected to have any other tendency. Solitary confinement, to be at all efficacious in preventing or punishing crimes in the army, keeps the soldier too long away from his necessary exercises and duties, and if it takes place in our common jails, whatever he may have gone into them, he certainly must come out matured in crime, from being the associate of criminals of the worst description; for what jail can contain sufficient cells to separate all who may be sent there. Offenders' lists, common and marching order drills, confinement to barracks, &c. &c., are all well enough, in these quiet times, for trifling offences or irregularities at home or abroad, so long as the soldier knows that he can be brought to the halberts for any act of insubordination on such occasions; but in case of war, and should it be necessary for our army to take the field, this system would never answer. I must beg, however, that it may not be supposed, that I am by any means an advocate for continuing corporal punishments, or that I have any intention of extenuating or justifying what was sometimes practised by officers, under generally, I feel convinced, a mistaken idea, that they were only doing what their duty required of them; but my surprise often was, how officers who composed courts-martial, could by their sentences, always so readily lend themselves to the views, or perhaps badly regulated feelings of their commanders: indeed the trials I have witnessed were sometimes little else than mere matter of form, and they could not well be otherwise, for I have seen a soldier receive two or three hundred, or even more lashes, inflicted with great severity, under a sentence awarded by a drum-head court-martial, after an investigation of a few minutes duration of the charges brought against him.