three servants agree, and that it is certain they did not behave treacherously by their master: also that Moorad had received a promissory note for 3,600 rupees, dated 3rd July, 1857, but which he never presented for payment, assigning as his reason the report current in Central Asia that the British rule had been overthrown. The government authorities in the Punjaub have admitted his claim, and Moorad has received the amount, together with a donation of 200 rupees, granted him as a reward for the trouble he had taken; but the skull delivered by him as that of his master to Colonel Irby, having been submitted to competent medical examiners has been pronounced that of a Tartar, but the Government record their thanks to Colonel Irby for the spirit with which he penetrated into Chinese Toorkistan in pursuit of information regarding the unfortunate Mr. Schlagintweit, which acknowledgment that distinguished officer certainly well deserved.

In excuse for the repetitions that occur in the above narrative, we must remind our readers that the matter is derived from a variety of sources, and that no two of the accounts in all particulars agree. In conclusion, it is due to the brothers Schlagintweit to state that the total length of the various routes, along which their researches were carried in India and Upper and Central Asia, amounts to about 18,000 miles, and that the result of their labours has been to add immensely to the stores of scientific information already accumulated by previous travellers. Exclusive of their drawings, which have elicited the highest admiration, a magnificent collection of mineralogical specimens, their interesting plastic collection of the Indian and Asiatic tribes, represented by facial casts now exhibited in the East India Museum, is pronounced by the Royal Asiatic Society to form the most important contribution that has ever been made to the study of Indian ethnology. Messrs. Herman and Robert Schlagintweit returned to Europe in June, 1857, and their magnificent geological collection, embracing 2,000 specimens of rocks and fossils, 1,400 specimens of soils, with a copious herbarium, and a fine zoological collection of skeletons, skins, and animals preserved in spirits of wine, are now placed in the East India Museum. The brothers have since been engaged in working out their scientific materials by the compilation of a magnificent Atlas in three folio volumes, dedicated to Her Majesty, containing 80 views and panoramas, and from 20 to 30 maps and profiles. The details of the brothers Schlagintweit's astronomical and magnetic operations fill above 400 pages of a quarto volume, dedicated to the Royal Society, which will be followed by some others, now in course of preparation, forming in the whole a general physical tableau of the various countries so scientifically explored.

MILITARY MURDERS.

THREE months ago I took pen in hand, and commenced jotting down some reflections upon this subject; but three months ago, when this dreadful epidemic was at its height, when day by day one took up the papers trembling, lest "another military murder" should meet one's eye, it was difficult to write collectedly and dis. passionately upon the subject. I waited therefore until the evil tide had turned a little, until the wail of the "Dead March" fel! fainter upon my ears, until some of those who had stained their hands so red had expiated their crimes, and rendered blood for blood. Now my task seems an easier one than it did then-an easier one, but still difficult, for it must always be difficult to examine a question fraught with so many intricacies, and presenting so many sidesa polyedron with its several sides blending, at first sight it may seem insensibly, one with another, but on more careful examination separated each from each by well-defined angles. I am the more daunted by observing how many abler pens than mine have touched upon this subject, and have failed in my opinion to throw such light upon it as for its thorough investigation is imperatively necessary. Nevertheless I have resolved to throw my mite into the ocean of discussion, to sink or swim as it may deserve.

"Military Murders"-a familiar enough alliteration now, unhappily, and associated in the minds of every Englishman who reads the papers, or listens to the gossip of the day, with crimes as dastardly and as brutal as any which have disgraced our criminal annals. As dastardly: this word, applied to the actions of British soldiers, happily, has scarcely yet a familiar sound, but no other word may be substituted when we are writing of such crimes as the Preston murder, the Chichester murder, the Aldershott murder, and others of a similar character which preceded or succeeded them, either in England or abroad; and it is concerning this phenomenon -I use the word advisedly-that we are now to engage ourselves. We are to examine how it is that the English soldier has committed actions which merit so odious an adjective; how it is that within a few months violent hands have been laid upon the chain, which under our boasted regimental system binds rank with rank in the links of discipline and friendship; how it is, in short, that some half-dozen British soldiers have turned assassins, and that-stranger stilltheir victims have been their own officers or sergeants!

This is the question, a tangled one enough, which we are now to examine as dispassionately and as carefully as we can.

It will not be necessary to divide my subject as I had at one time proposed, into the two heads of "the causes of the recent military murders," and "the remedies," for the one will be suggested by the other, and it will be more convenient to consider the two together.

The causes of these murders, it is hardly necessary to state, are numerous; some of them are too subtle for us to take hold of and dissect, but some of them, to my mind, large and distinct enough. It is with these last that we shall have to do with the minor causes ; those which affected separately each of these particular cases it is not necessary to concern ourselves, although, doubtless, in the consideration of each particular case they would play an important part. But

we have now to do with an aggregation of cases, and will confine ourselves, therefore, as much as possible to those broad and general considerations which affect the cases en masse, and therefore the British army at large; and which not only may be shown to have a direct bearing upon military crimes generally, but which, until things are put upon a better footing, will ever be found not less evidently playing an important part in military tragedies of the nature of those with which we are now immediately engaged.

One powerful cause of these crimes I consider to be a certain impatience of discipline, which has been engendered in the mind of the English soldier by the tone which is too frequently adopted by persons and papers in the discussion of military questions. Even in the cases which we are now treating of, this tone has been present, for the principal civilian hypothesis which has been advanced respecting their cause has been the inefficiency and shortcomings of the officers, the impossibility of the soldier obtaining redress for his grievances, and the rottenness of a system under which these combined evils can exist. Thus grievances, it is alleged, fester under the surface until they break out in alarming sores; and, in short, it is concluded that although of course murder is an extreme and unwarrantable measure, it is not so very surprising after all to find the soldier adopting this terrible remedy for his grievances. Let us set aside for a moment the dangers of expressing such views as the se, and consider briefly how far they are consistent with truth. I am sure, in the first place, nobody connected with the army holds these views; I am sure if you ask the men themselves they will tell you that they are incorrect; I am sure that such an explanation can only proceed from one inexcusably ignorant of the subject upon which he writes. This may appear very like begging the question, but I have no hesitation in saying that no class of the community has its rights so strictly preserved to it as the soldier; it is the very attention which is paid to the preserving of these rights which makes it imperative to lay down stringent rules to prevent groundless and unreasonable complaints from being preferred. The very elaboration of the machinery by which a soldier obtains redress for his grievances necessitates our working always with pure materials, and taking care that it is not thrown out of order by the introduction of some hard and gritty alloy. We do not ask a man to draw out a brief of his case before preferring it; but we insist upon his making sure that he has a grievance before calling upon his officer to assist him. But when that assistance is properly worked it is always forthcoming. It would save civilians some trouble, and much hammering out of ingenious hypotheses if they could be made properly aware of this, and if they could be made to understand that officers consider their own interests and those of their men as identical, not as antagonistic. The English officer, as a rule, has no higher gratification than finding the men under his command contented and happy, and the men, as a rule, have no reason to be otherwise. Exceptions there may be on both sides, I admit,-errors of judgment on the part of the officer, petty rankling grievances on the part of the men. Wrong conceptions may be, and sometimes are, formed of character, whether the superior be judging his inferior, or vice versa; but the part of

those writing upon this subject assuredly ought not to be to insert a wedge into this narrow opening, and to exaggerate this misunderstanding, but rather to close it up, and to set the cross purposes straight. That persons wanting such explanations of these crimes as "J. O.," for instance, in his letter to the Times, do thus make mischief where none naturally exists, I have no hesitation in affirming; for to say that the English officer generally is inefficient, or worse; -that his men generally suffer in the shape of unredressed grievances from this inefficiency; and that these co-existent evils produce ultimately such crimes as we have recently sighed over, is to say what is grossly and cruelly false. If "J. O" had stated that English officers were not infallible, and that English soldiers were not altogether free from grievances, he might have been exposed to criticism on the grounds of having uttered a platitude, but the light thus thrown upon the cause of these military murders would scarcely have been less intense than that afforded by his present explanation, while he might have congratulated himself on the double grounds of having confined his remarks to the region of facts, and of having avoided heaping fuel upon the fire in his, doubtless, well-meaning efforts to extinguish it.

To return, however, for a moment to the preferring of complaints. Any one connected with the army will bear me out in saying that no officer DARE-however his wishes might incline him-to withhold a man's complaint from the proper authorities. Happily our military system is too harmonious to admit of this; one fact dovetails too nicely into the other to make it possible to injure one without violently shocking and affecting the whole. And so, I repeat, the soldier is not tongue-tied on the subject of his grievances. On the contrary, in well-disciplined regiments, and those in the English army happily are the rule and not the exception, the men are afforded every opportunity and encouragement for preferring their complaints. Only let them be certain that their complaint is worthy of being preferred. I do not mean that it is necessary that their complaint should be upon a subject affecting the army or regiment at large, and not the man only, that it should prove mightily important in any sense, or even that upon investigation it must prove so well grounded that a verdict cannot but be given for the plaintiff, but it must not be vexatious; those who have commanded men will know only too readily what this word vexatious, as applied to soldiers' complaints, means. It is against such complaints, and such only, that we erect barriers; nor must these wholesome restraints be mistaken for a chevaux-de-frize of discipline planted indiscriminately to separate officers, their interests, and convenience, from the men. The bars and bolts we place upon our doors are to keep out thieves, not honest men.

The complaint properly preferred, and the grievance properly established, it is indeed rare that the soldier does not obtain redress. A few exceptional cases there may be, but it is hardly possible that in the administration of an army such cases should not exist; but they are as rare as attention and an earnest love of justice, and desire to do right, on the part of all concerned, can make them.

It is unfair then and as I hope to be able to show presently

worse than unfair, to attribute carelessness in these matters to the officers or the higher authorities, or to seek to establish that under our regimental system, a soldier with a properly established grievance need remain long with that grievance unredressed.

As regards the alleged inefficiency of the officers: we have not been directly told, it is true, that the unfortunate victims of these murders were inefficient, but we have been given to understand that if the system of promotion by selection were to be adopted, such catastrophes might be in a great measure avoided-and this amounts to very much the same thing. But applying this argument, par et simple, to the particular cases which have given rise to this discussion, we find, curiously enough, that in the case of each of the victims of these crimes the system of promotion by selection had been carried out! Colonel Crofton was commanding a depot battalion, and a colonel does not arrive at the command of a depot battalion solely by chance and purchase. Captain Hanham, we may believe, was specially selected for the appointment of adjutant-as is every other adjutant in the service for the same qualifications which would recommend officers for promotion in case the system of selection came to be more generally applied. Serjeant-Major Kennedy, of the Military Train, probably was carefully selected for promotion to that particular rank; and as for the sergeants who have been shot, it may be stated generally that the system of promotion among noncommissioned officers is exclusively one of selection. In the face of these facts, then, it is difficult to see how any moral respecting the necessity of promotion by selection as a means of reducing the number of these crimes, can be pointed from the particular cases before us.

I have thus endeavoured to show how the explanations which civilians have hazarded respecting the cause of these murders are altogether incorrect, and how, even in these particular instances, where one would have thought people's sympathies would have been all one way, a false and pernicious tone has been imparted to the reflections to which these unhappy incidents have given rise.

As we extend our inquiries, we shall find that it has been the same in numerous other cases,-perhaps more excusably. In the case of the émeute, as it was the bad fashion to call the mutiny aboard the "Princess Royal;" in the case of the émeute among the cadets at Woolwich; in the case of deserters who have been flogged-" poor Moorer" for example,-and in numerous cases where the taint of insubordination has appeared, public opinion, if it has not actually expressed itself in favour of the offenders, has generally availed itself of the occasion to launch a shaft against the authorities, and, to the prejudice of good order and military discipline, to inveigh against either the harshness of particular regulations, or the system generally to which the offender is opposed.

(To be continued.)