Two widely different conceptions of military discipline are contained in the words of an English writer of the seventeenth century, and in those of the French philosopher, Helvetius, in the eighteenth century. There is a fine ring of the best English spirit in the sentence of Gittins: ‘A soldier ought to fear nothing but God and dishonour.’ And there is the true French wit and insight in that of Helvetius: ‘Discipline is but the art of inspiring soldiers with more fear for their own officers than they have for the enemy.’[275] But the difference involved lies less in the national character of the writers than in the lapse of time between them, discipline having by degrees gained so greatly in severity that a soldier had come to be regarded less as a moral free agent than as a mechanical instrument, who, if he had any fear left for God and dishonour, felt it in a very minor degree to that which he cherished for his colonel or commander. This is the broad fact which explains and justifies the proposition of Helvetius; though no one, recollecting the evils of the days of looser discipline, might see cause to regret the change which deprived a soldier almost entirely of the moral liberty that naturally belonged to him as a man. The tendency of discipline to become more and more severe has of course the effect of rendering military service less popular, and consequently recruiting more difficult, without, unhappily, any corresponding diminution in the frequency of wars, which are independent of the hirelings who fight them. Were it otherwise, something might be said for the military axiom, that a soldier enjoys none of the common rights of man. There is therefore no gain from any point of view in denying to the military class the enjoyment of the rights and privileges of ordinary humanity. The extent of this denial and its futility may be shown by reference to army regulations concerning marriage and religious worship. In the Prussian army, till 1870, marriages were legally null and void and the offspring of them illegitimate in the case of officers marrying without royal consent, or of subordinate officers without the consent of the commander of their regiments. But after the Franco-German war so great was the social disorder found to be consequent upon these restrictions, that a special law had to be made to remove the bar of illegitimacy from the marriages in question.[276] In the English army the inability of privates to marry before the completion of seven years’ service, and the possession of at least one badge, and then only with the consent of the commanding officer, is a custom so entirely contrary to the liberty enjoyed in other walks of life, that, whatever its incidental advantages, it can scarcely fail to act as a deterring motive when the choice of a career becomes a subject of reflection.