We expected they would have got off, by being reduced from their rank; but the commanding officer seemed to consider their crime of too heinous a nature, to let them escape with an ordinary punishment. They were tried by a General Regimental Court Martial, and sentenced to be reduced to the rank and pay of private, to receive five hundred lashes, to be branded on the side with the letter D, and afterwards to be sent to (what is usually termed) a banished regiment. One of them was an intelligent man, who had been respectably brought up—the other a young man scarcely twenty years of age; the former did not live to go abroad—he died in Dublin, I believe of a broken heart; the other went abroad, but I never heard what became of him. The impression throughout the regiment at the time was, that the sentence was most unreasonably severe, particularly that part of it that awarded the corporeal punishment. Will that disgrace to the country never be done away with? I am perfectly convinced it could be done without, and those who advocate it, must be men who are either wofully ignorant of human nature, or whose passions obscure their reason, and induce them to act contrary to their better judgment; the latter is the most common of the two. I have known commanding officers who have acted in this respect rationally and wisely, while their personal feelings were not strongly excited; but who, when they were so, committed the most flagrant injustice. Why should there not be a definite code of military laws for the army? for that abstruse, vague, and indefinable thing called ‘the mutiny act,’ surely does not deserve the name. I defy any two persons separately, to make the same commentary on it. In it so much is left to the private opinion of courts martial, that the sentences passed by them are often preposterously unequal: for instance, I have known a man tried by one court martial, and sentenced to three hundred lashes, and another for the same crime, without any palliating circumstance in his favour, sentenced to fourteen days’ solitary confinement. What are we to make of this inconsistency? It is evident it proceeded from the temper of the individuals composing the court. If these things appear hard or unjust, why not rectify them, by attaching a definite punishment to every crime, at least as far as circumstances admitted? The business of courts martial would then be clear and easy; nor would officers feel themselves in the unpleasant predicament in which they are often placed. Corporeal punishment ought to be abolished altogether; I am perfectly convinced it could be done without. In many regiments we have strong proofs of the allegation; and the fact, that where punishment is most frequent, the men are the worst behaved, and _vice versa_, cannot be denied.