It is surely something like a degradation to the soldier that he should not enjoy in this respect the same rights as the civilian; that his merit alone should be tested by no higher a theory of duty than that which is applied to the merit of a horse; and that his capacity for blind and unreasoning obedience should be accounted his highest attainable virtue. The transition from the idea of military vassalage to that of military allegiance has surely produced a strange conception of honour, and one fitter for conscripts than for free men, when a man is held as by a vice to take part in a course of action which he believes to be wrong. Not only does no other profession enforce such an obligation, but in every other walk of life a man’s assertion of his own personal responsibility is a source rather of credit to him than of infamy. That in the performance of any social function a man should be called upon to make an unconditional surrender of his free will, and yield an obedience as thoughtless as a dummy’s to superior orders, would seem to be a principle of conduct pilfered from the Society of Jesus, and utterly unworthy of the nobility of a soldier. As a matter of history, the priestly organisation took the military one for its model: which should lead us to suspect that the tyranny we find fault with in the copy is equally present in the original, and that the latter is marked by the same vices that it transmitted to the borrowed organisation. The principle here contended for, that the soldier should be fully satisfied in his own mind of the justice of the cause he fights for, is the condition that Christian writers, from Augustine to Grotius, have placed on the lawfulness of military service. The objection to it, that its adoption would mean the ruin of military discipline, will appear the greatest argument of all in its favour when we reflect that its universal adoption would make war itself, which is the only reason for discipline, altogether impossible. Where would have been the wars of the last two hundred years had it been in force? Or where the English wars of the last six, with their thousands of lives and their millions of money spent for no visible good nor glory in fighting with Afghans, Zulus, Egyptians, and Arabs? Once restrict legitimate warfare to the limits of national defence, and it is evident that the refusal of men to take part in a war of aggression would equally put an end to the necessity of defensive exertion. If no government could rely on its subjects for the purposes of aggression and injustice, it goes without saying that the just cause of war would perish simultaneously. It is therefore altogether to be wished that that reliance should be weakened and destroyed.