The majority of our soldiers are enlisted from a different class to volunteers. The same restrictions, rigid rules, and discipline to which the former are subjected would be exceedingly distasteful to the latter, whose superior knowledge and discrimination between right and wrong would render them very troublesome to the school of commanding officers of the present day. They would grumble and spread discontent to a degree that might be dangerous to the discipline of the army as at present constituted. It is true that very many of our soldiers are drawn from the strongest, the hardiest, and I may add the most headstrong class of people in the world: for the most part, they are given to habits of intemperance, and always taught from boyhood to consider independence a virtue, and to look upon the higher classes as their enemies. When, however, they become soldiers, they are required at once to abandon all such thoughts, and yield implicit obedience to the restrictions on their habits and feelings. I have already stated that this class of men are really benefited by the change from a civil to a military life, and also set forth my reasons for so stating. But such a change for the majority of our volunteers as they are at present constituted would be anything but welcome, for it must be remembered that, however gallant they may be in action, or however well conducted generally, promotion is very slow in the British army, and, after all, it is not scrupulously awarded according to merit. The habits and manners of the British volunteer in civil life are far different to those of three-fourths of the regular army before they enlisted. But when divested of his clownish manners and rendered obedient to his superiors, the common labourer is in every point of view (except that of making him into a non-commissioned officer) a better man for military purposes than the son of a tradesman. He is quite as moral, as docile, and can stand the change of climate better than three-fourths of the volunteers we see marching so gaily through the streets of our large towns and cities. Soldiers are required to march, to fight, to starve, to encounter storms at sea, pestilence on land, to abandon their native country, relatives, and friends, for years--often for life. They have little pay, few promises of rewards, and still fewer rewards; and when worn out and miserable, and racked with pain from long hardships and wounds, they are too often sent in poverty to their native places, and pine away their lives the lowest of the lowly. The life of a private soldier, infantry or cavalry, would be considered on the whole as one irksome and distasteful to the natural feelings of a great number of our volunteers. The duty of the former is to "work at soldiers," and the latter only to "play at soldiers." But, rich or poor, educated or uneducated, they must all be kept in strict subordination in the army,