to read with patience in the diaries and letters of the subordinate officers the state of military mismanagement that existed at this time. We have heard a good deal in recent years of the evil done by letting the light of public opinion into military administration; but if men care to know what happened to our army when the Press was gagged, when authority strutted its way from blunder to blunder unchecked by the fear of public censure, they should study the military history of the early years of the century from the rupture of the Peace of Amiens to the campaign of Corunna. Here is a little glimpse of the interior economy of a regiment quartered in the healthiest part of England in the year 1807. Charles Napier is now in the Fiftieth Regiment, quartered at Ashford in Kent. "Our men," he writes, "have got the ophthalmia very badly, and are dying fast also from inflammation of the lungs caused by the coldness of the weather and bad barracks; in some cases typhus supervenes, but is not contagious. There is no raging fever, cold alone is the cause, yet the men die three or four a day. No officer suffers; they are warmer." This was in the month of March. But two months later, in May, the story is not better. "The soldiers have got pneumonia at Hythe," he writes, "and are dying as fast as we folks at Ashford. Only think of a surgeon taking in one day one hundred and sixty ounces of blood, and the man is recovering! They say bleeding to death is the best way of recovering them!" And all this time a very savage and inhuman discipline was going on. Nine hundred lashes was a common punishment for a trifling offence. Both William Napier and Charles Napier have left us many terrible pictures of "the ferocity of a discipline which was a disgrace to civilisation." Writing of the campaign of 1793-94 in Flanders Sir Robert Wilson is still more emphatic. It was a common sight, he tells us, to see a court-martial sitting in the morning the members of which were not yet sober after the debauch of the previous night, but still sentencing unfortunate private soldiers to nine hundred lashes for the crime of drunkenness, the punishment being inflicted summarily in presence of the still inebriated dispensers of justice!