That it should be necessary thus to provide against self-inflicted injuries is surely commentary enough on the condition of life in the ranks. The allusion to tampering with the eyes may be illustrated from a passage in the ‘Life of Sir C. Napier,’ wherein we are told how in the year 1808 a private of the 28th Regiment taught his fellow-soldiers to produce artificial ophthalmia by holding their eyelids open, whilst a comrade in arms would scrape some lime from the barrack ceiling into their eyes.[295] For a profession of which such things are common incidents, surely the wonder is, not that it should be difficult, but that it should be possible at all, to make recruits. In the days of Mehemet Ali in Egypt, so numerous were the cases in which the natives voluntarily blinded themselves, and even their children, of one eye in order to escape the conscription, that Mehemet Ali is said to have found himself under the necessity of raising a one-eyed regiment. Others for the same purpose would chop off the trigger finger of the right hand, or disable themselves from biting cartridges by knocking out some of their upper teeth. Scarcely a peasant in the fields but bore the trace of some such voluntarily inflicted disfigurement. But with such facts it seems idle to talk of any inherent love for fighting dominating the vast majority of mankind. The severity of military discipline has even a worse effect than those yet alluded to in its tendency to demoralise those who are long subject to it, by inducing mental habits of servility and baseness. After Alexander the Great had killed Clitus in a fit of drunken rage, the Macedonian soldiery voted that Clitus had been justly slain, and prayed that he might not enjoy the rites of sepulture.[296] Military servility could scarcely go further than that, but such baseness is only possible under a state of discipline which, to make a soldier, unmakes a man, by depriving him of all that distinguishes his species. Under no other than military training, and in no other than the military class, would the atrocities have been possible which used to be perpetrated in the barrack riding-school in the old flogging days. Officers and privates needed the debasing influence of discipline to enable them to look on as patient spectators at the sufferings of a helpless comrade tortured by the cat-o’-nine tails. Sir C. Napier said that as a subaltern he ‘frequently saw 600, 700, 800, 900, and 1,000 lashes sentenced by regimental courts-martial and generally every lash inflicted;’ a feeling of horror would run through the ranks at the first blows and some recruits would faint, but that was all.[297] Had they been men and not soldiers, they would not have stood such iniquities. A typical instance of this martial justice or law (to employ the conventional profanation of those words) was that of a sergeant who in 1792 was sentenced to 1,000 lashes for having enlisted two drummers