Assuming limitation of service and the abolition of corporal punishment to have been conceded, the next thing demanding attention would be the education of the soldier. This has hitherto been sadly neglected, strangely so at a period and in a country where education of the people is so strongly and generally advocated. The schoolmaster is abroad, we are told--we should be glad to hear of his visiting the barrack-room. To no class of the population would a good plain education be more valuable than to the soldier, as a means of filling up his abundant leisure, of improving his moral condition, and preserving him from drunkenness and vice. How extraordinary that its advantages should so long have been overlooked, even by those to whom they ought to have been the most palpable. "Of two hundred and fourteen officers," Mr Marshall writes, "who returned answers to the following query, addressed to them by the General Commanding in Chief, in 1834, only two or three recommended intellectual, moral, or religious cultivation as a means of preventing crime:--'Are you enabled to suggest any means of restraining, or eradicating the propensity to drunkenness, so prevalent among the soldiery, and confessedly the parent of the majority of military crimes?' A great variety of penal enactments were recommended, but no one suggested the school master's drill but Sir George Arthur and the late Colonel Oglander. The colonel's words are:--'The only effectual corrective of this, as of every other vice, is a sound and rational sense of religion. This is the only true foundation of moral discipline. The establishment of libraries, and the system of _adult_ schools, would be useful in this view.'" To prevent crime is surely better than to punish it. Vast pains are taken with the merely military education of the soldier. A recruit is carefully drilled into the perpendicular, taught to handle his musket, mount his guards, clean his accoutrements--converted, in short, into an excellent automaton--and then he is dismissed as perfect, and left to lounge away, as best he may, his numerous hours of daily leisure. He has perhaps never been taught to read and write, or may possess those accomplishments but imperfectly. What more natural than to encourage, and, if necessary, to compel him to acquire them, together with such other useful scholarship as it may be desirable for him to possess? Education would be especially valuable under a system of limited service. The soldier, leaving the army when still a young man, would be better fitted than before he entered it, for any trade or occupation he might adopt. And when the lower classes found that military service was made a medium for the communication of knowledge, and that their sons, after seven years passed under the colours, were better able to get through the world advantageously and creditably than when they enlisted, the present strong prejudice against a soldier's life would