that the Judge Advocate-General had obtained further information from India which had compelled him to reverse his previous decision, that Mr. Smales' sentence was, after all, illegal, and that he had consequently been pardoned. The paymaster's friends were, however, hardly allowed time to congratulate him on this unexpected turn in his affairs, before another letter from Sir Edward Lugard appeared, explaining to the perplexed paymaster that the pardon which he had received was an honorary and theoretical pardon as it were-for that it was only to date from the day after that on which the punishment to which he had been sentenced should have been fully carried out; and that he was to receive neither arrears of pay, nor half-pay, nor future employment, but was to remain for the rest of his life, thanks to the mercy of his Sovereign, a ruined, though pardoned, civilian.

-The result of this blundering injustice will be that the Judge Advocate-General will elevate an obscure and not altogether blameless individual to the dignity of a martyred innocent, and that the WarOffice and the public will hear a good deal more of Mr. Smales before they have done with him. Nor do the military authorities deserve much sympathy under the infliction which they are thus perversely drawing down upon themselves. It is manifestly unjust that a man should be punished for a crime of which he has been illegally convicted, under the pretence that he has probably committed a crime of quite a different nature which his opponents appear afraid to press against him; and it is as manifestly indecent that her Majesty's pardon should thus be ingeniously distorted by the law advisers of the Crown into an indirect instrument of punishment.

I cannot conclude this paper without earnestly calling the attention of those whom it may concern to the antiquated, cumbrous, and impotent machinery, by means of which the administration of justice is still attempted in the British service. Courts-martial are, to all intents and purposes, courts of law; they ought not to be swayed by any sentimental or conventional notions of honour or professional usage; and should be conducted strictly according to the established rules of British jurisprudence, save where the Mutiny Act has otherwise ordered. But no ław reform has yet been permitted to penetrate within their narrow and obscure precincts. The wholesome rays of publicity illumine and ventilate their proceedings only on extreme occasions, such as that which is just now under consideration. The curative operation of legal criticism is never openly and fairly applied to them; and they continue in the present day to blunder and grope in the dark for their verdicts, precisely as they did one hundred years ago. An intolerable dilatoriness of proceeding, a tendency to diverge into irrelevant issues, an absence of all rapid and effective cross-examination, and a readiness to admit evidence which ought to be rejected, and to reject evidence which ought to be received, form but a few of the many deplorable characteristics which distinguish these feeble and unsatisfactory tribunals. The officers who serve

on them, and the officers whose duty it is, as acting judge-advocates, to direct them, are too often themselves completely ignorant of the laws of the land and of the rules of evidence, and are sadly prone to grasp at the conclusions towards which their professional instincts and prejudices point, without taking common care that their verdicts are borne out by the evidence which has been submitted to them. What a cynical French writer has asserted of the majority of his countrywomen, "Qu'elles n'ont point de principes, elles se conduisent par le cœur," may with far more truth be said of most of our courts-martial, which constantly convict prisoners because they wish to convict them, and not because the charges upon which they have been arraigned have been legally proved. It is remarkable, too, that the habit of "hard swearing," a crime which in our civil courts bears the uglier name of perjury, does not draw down from British courts-martial upon the officers and gentlemen who indulge in it the same stern meed of censure and punishment which is invariably awarded to it in civil courts by the Judges of the land. One would almost be inclined to suspect, so lightly is that evil practice viewed in military circles, that, as easy-going moralists hold it to be scarcely a crime for a man of pleasure to forswear himself in defence of a frail fair one's fame, so our courts-martial consider that a moderate amount of "hard swearing" in support of a patron, or of "the interests of discipline," is a comparatively venial offence, of which no serious notice is taken in that revised and mitigated version of the Decalogue, which men of honour of a certain class are in the habit of constructing for themselves, in lieu of the sterner and less convenient Mosaic original. Such, at least, is the only way in which the frightful amount of perjury can be accounted for, which disfigures the proceedings of so many of our courts-martial, and which invariably escapes the censure, and even the notice, of the court, provided always the "hard swearing" be on the side of authority and power. Both in the Robertson-Bentinck case in Dublin, and in this recent trial at Mhow, the prosecutors openly imputed that crime to the prisoners' witnesses, without making any serious effort to establish the terrible charge; and the court on both occasions listened to the unsupported calumny in approving silence, and endorsed it by their verdicts, which, as soon as they were tested by impartial and competent legal criticism, were reluctantly, but necessarily, set aside.

The number of troops stationed in England is so small, and the influences of society are so strong and binding on their officers, that military trials on subjects of importance are comparatively rare in this country. When, however, they do occur, the usual result is, either that an unpopular or obscure prisoner is treated with signal injustice, especially if he belong to the non-combatant branches of the service; or, more frequently, that military crime goes entirely unpunished, by reason of the incompetence or the partiality of the court. But it is in India, and in our more distant colonies, that the defects of our system of military law are most saliently illustrated. The size of our armies in the Indian presidencies, the vast area

over which they are scattered, the distance from head-quarters, the consequent relaxation of discipline, and many other obvious causes calculated to engender the commission of military crime, afford ample opportunities for testing its inefficiency. It would be well worth the while of any Member of Parliament, ambitious of rendering a good service to his country, to cause the records of the Judge Advocate's offices in London and in Calcutta to be searched, and a collection to be made of the many instances in which, during the last twenty-five years, notorious and avowed failures of justice have resulted from the ignorance, caprice, and lâches of courts-martial. The mere statistics of these cases, together with the remarks and subsequent decision of the superior authorities thereupon, would certainly raise a universal cry for reform. Great as the existing evil is, and powerful as are the professional prejudices by which it will probably be supported, there exists a sovereign specific for it ready to our hands a specific which has of late years been tried in many analogous cases, and usually with immediate and complete success. A public inquiry into the working of our present system of military jurisprudence, by a Parliamentary Committee or a Royal Commission, is all that is required, in order to bring about a more satisfactory state of things. And it will indeed be discreditable to the present Government, if such a cruel, disastrous, and costly complication as that which has been occasioned by the misconduct of the late court-martial at Mhow, is permitted to pass away, without some endeavour to extract permanent good out of the great wrong which has just been perpetrated in the outraged name of Military Justice.

October 15, 1863.

J. O.

582

Margaret Denzil's History.

(Annotated by her Husband.)

CHAPTER I.

IN THE BEGINNING.

How my history was begun for me that is to say, where I was born and who were my parents-is doubtful still, I sometimes think. Only this I have found out for certain that in life as well as in storytelling the beginning is very important, and that a good ending can scarcely come of a bad beginning. Not we, but our fathers and mothers begin our lives; and if we are to do well, that is a thing they ought to be very careful about. Careful that there is no guilt, no secrecy; careful to put an untangled thread into our hands when we are to carry on for ourselves, and not a tangled one which is a great task and a heavy shame.

We shall see presently whether I have been reasonably accounted for. But, to begin, I do not think I ever believed myself really the child of Richard and Elizabeth Forster, cottagers of the New Forest. In the first place I never loved them; and though they lived in great seclusion, I had opportunities enough of seeing there was something between other parents and their children, some indescribable sense of loving and belonging, which there was not in our home. But then there was not much of that between my father and mother themselves; and I used to think at a very early age indeed that it was their having me that made the difference.

In the next place, there was that about the very house which made it seem to me not my home. Had it been a cottage like other cottages, with thatched roof and diamond-paned windows, and climbing plants hanging from the walls, and bow-pots, and a garden of flowers, that would have satisfied me; but all the instincts of my nature revolted against what it was. It was not like a cottage at all. Much more did it resemble a slice of a barrack—so formal and heavy, with its walls of dull red brick, its cold slate roof on which no bird ever alighted, and its narrow windows viciously staring like little Malayan eyes without eyebrows. There was not a flower nor a shrub about it—nothing prettier than a patch of houseleek that squatted like a toad over the sentry-box which shaded the doorway. My natural home was not like that; and I remember no time in my life when I did not think so, in a dim discontented way.

Again, I have not made out that the children of English peasants are often educated in French convent schools; and yet I was sent to one of