This statement of the grievances of the private soldier may not represent the actual words of Percennius, but it is strangely familiar. Protracted service is not at present included among the grievances of the English soldier, but we have already taken one step in a direction which may lead to its inclusion. The Roman Empire shirked the recruiting difficulty, and in the end brought down upon itself countless disasters. If the English Empire follows the same path, it will find itself some day at the same destination. The conditions are strangely similar. By the institution of slavery the whole body of operatives throughout the Roman Empire was exempted from military service, the recruiting ground was artificially restricted. We have no artificial restriction in the English Empire, but the operatives have been allowed gradually to withdraw themselves from even the limited obligation to military service imposed by the ancient regulations of the militia, and they have further been allowed to assume that whatever may happen to other people they are not to be conscious of the burden of taxation; they are practically as free from military service and taxation as the slaves of antiquity. When these mutinies were eventually suppressed Tiberius found himself unable to confirm the grant of a discharge after sixteen years’ service, and was obliged to fix it at twenty years; he said that the Empire could not stand the change, and deplored, in strangely modern language, the breakdown of the “voluntary system.” The statesmen of his time could not touch the institution of slavery; the demand for a conscription of slaves would have been resisted on every ground of public expediency; there would have been an outcry against interference with private property. We have no institution which forbids us to make soldiers of our intelligent working-men; they can be invited and encouraged to take their share in bearing the burden of defence. The statesman who discovers the best means of bringing them into the recruiting field will have solved the most pressing difficulty of the English Empire.