They are eminently calculated to produce the _esprit de corps_, a just pride and honourable rivalry; and, by the past glories they represent, to inspire in our army that heroic virtue of which the elder Pitt spoke so eloquently in Parliament, when he said of our troops, in the debate upon pay:-- "To the virtue of the British Army we have hitherto trusted; to that virtue, small as the army is, we must still trust; and without that virtue, the Lords, the Commons, and the people of England may intrench themselves behind parchment up to the teeth; but the sword will find a passage to the vitals of the constitution!" Hence it is, that even the lace, the buttons, and other insignia of a corps are so carefully shorn from the uniform of the unhappy soldier who is disgraced, and rendered incapable of bearing arms again; and when writing of those things, perhaps we cannot do better than close this article by an anecdote which records one of the most startling instances of wholesale disgrace that ever occurred in a European army. THE DEGRADATION OF THE REGIMENT OF ABO. In all armies corps have frequently been punished _en masse_, by being sent on foreign service or hazardous duty out of their turn, for the crimes of individuals, for general discontent, or for mutiny. Some have been exterminated, like the Janizzaries and the Mamelukes; decimated, like the Chapelgorris, or Red Caps, a battalion, of 800 Guipuzcoan Volunteers, famous in the army of the Queen of Spain; or, like that Carlist Regiment, which, for sundry acts of sacrilege, was formed in line, and had every tenth file, with his coverer, taken out and shot. In the "Art of War, 1720," we are told that during the campaign in Holland, a captain, and his entire company, belonging to an Italian regiment, were hanged in line for desertion at Emerich, in the Duchy of Cleves; and in later times, in our own service, the 6th Royal Irish Dragoons, a fine old corps, consisting originally of nine troops, embodied under Colonel James Wynne, in the winter of 1688, with the Harp and Garter on their colours,--a corps that was brigaded with the Greys on the extreme right in the campaigns of Marlborough, and which, after serving with characteristic bravery in all our wars till those of the French Revolution, was disbanded in 1798 (for alleged sympathy with the Irish Insurgents), when General Lord Rossmore was their colonel; and since when, as a mark of the royal displeasure, their place and number remained vacant in the Army List for sixty years, until the present 5th Royal Irish Lancers were embodied in 1858; but in no instance was there ever a wholesale disgrace inflicted on a corps such as that to which the King of Sweden, Gustavus III., subjected the unfortunate Regiment of Abo.