"The incorrigible deserter," says Dr Fergusson, "may be safely committed to penal service in the West Indies or the coast of Africa; and should the pseudo-philanthropists interfere with the cant of false humanity, let them be told that the best and bravest of our troops have too often been sent there, as to posts of honour and duty, from which they are hereafter to be saved by the substitution of the criminal and the worthless. The other nations of the Continent, who have not these outlets, conduct the discipline of their armies without flogging; and why should not we? They, it may be said, cultivate the point of honour. And does not the germ of pride and honour reside as well, and better, in the breast of the British soldier, distinguished, as he has ever been, for fidelity to his colours, obedience to his commanders, pride in his corps, and attachment to its very name?" Mr Marshall's history of punishments in the army is rather to be termed curious than useful. Agreeable it certainly cannot be considered, except by those persons, if such there be, who luxuriate in Fox's _Book of Martyrs_, or gloat over the annals of the Spanish Inquisition. It shows human ingenuity taxed to the utmost to invent new tortures for the soldier. The last adhered to, and, it may safely be said, the worst devised, is the lash; and we need look back but a very little way to find its infliction carried to a frightful extent. A thousand lashes used to be no unusual award; and it sometimes happened (frequently, Mr Marshall asserts, but this other information induces us to doubt) that a man who had been unable, with safety to his life, to receive the whole of the punishment at one time, was brought out again, as soon as his back was skinned over, to take the rest. At one time there was no limit to the number of lashes that a general court-martial might award. Mr Marshall says, that at Amboyna, in the year 1813 or 1814, he knew three men to be condemned to fifteen hundred lashes each. The whole punishment was inflicted. At Dinapore, on the 12th September 1825, a man was sentenced to nineteen hundred lashes, which sentence the commander-in-chief commuted to twelve hundred. Such sentences, however, were in direct contradiction to the general order of the 30th January 1807, by which "his Majesty was graciously pleased to express his opinion, that no sentence for corporal punishment should exceed one thousand lashes." In 1812, when the powers of a regimental court-martial had been limited to the infliction of three hundred lashes, "many old officers believed, and did not hesitate to say, that such limitation would destroy the discipline of the army."--(_Marshall_, p. 185.) We cannot put the same faith that Mr Marshall appears to do in the outrageous narratives of some of his authorities. It is impossible, for instance, to swallow such a tale as we find at page 267 of the _Military Miscellany_, of seventy men of one battalion being flogged on the line of march in one day.