Constituted and regulated as the British army now is, the immediate consequences of enlistment to the young peasant or artisan of previous respectability is a total breach with his family. However good his previous character, the single fact of his entering what ought to be an honourable profession, excludes him from the society and good opinion of his nearest friends. Former associates shun and look coldly upon him, his female relatives are ashamed to be seen walking with him, often the door of his father's cottage or workshop is shut on his approach. The community in general, there is no dissembling the fact, look upon soldiers as a degraded class, and upon the recruit as a man consigned to evil company, to idleness and the alehouse, and perhaps to the ignominy of the lash. To brand an innocent man as criminal is the way to render him so. Avoided and despised, the young soldier, to whom bad example is not wanting, speedily comes to deserve the disreputable character which the mere assumption of a red coat has caused to be fixed upon him. So long as military service stands thus low in the opinion of the people, the army will have to recruit its ranks from the profligate and the utterly destitute, and the supply of respectable volunteers will be as limited as heretofore. At present, most young men of a better class whom a temporary impulse, or a predilection for the service, has induced to enlist, strain every nerve, when they awake to their real position, to raise funds for their discharge. In this their friends often aid them; and we have known instances of incredible sacrifices being made by the poor to snatch a son or brother from what they looked upon as the jaws of destruction. And thus is it that a large proportion of the respectable recruits are bought out after a brief period of service.