pound, but he is only allowed to have a quarter of a pound at a time, lest instead of smoking it, he should be tempted to sell it. For his mess, he gets a pound and a half of bread per day, and a quarter of a pound of beef twice a day, with vegetables, to make soup for his noonday meal, and for his supper.

The conscription once completed, those who have drawn blanks, that is numbers below the compliment of troops required, and who have thus to use the French phrase tombés au sort, return to their homes, some joyous, some sad, some indifferent, but all of them changed young men from what they were on that morning, when they issued from the paternal roof. A month now elapses or thereabouts, when the young recruits are officially served with a printed circular, informing them of the day on which they are to present themselves at the town-hall of the chief city of their department, where they receive their ordre de route. Then takes place the conscripts' departure, “Le depart du conscrit," a great event all over France, especially in war time, Friends and families accompany the recruits to the general rendezvous, where they arrive with village drums beating, and village colours flying, with tri-coloured ribbons round their hats, bundles on their backs, and a sturdy stick in their hands. A halt is made in the grande place of the town, and all parties quickly betake themselves to some wine-house, and there indulge in a parting glass. The inspection over, the marching orders are distributed, adieux, and love pledges to "the girls they leave behind them" are interchanged, many fair eyes teeming with pearly emotion all the while, and off start our young braves in various bands, some singing

"Ah qu'il est beau d'être soldat."

Some thing equivalent to the English song beginning "How happy's the soldier who lives on his pay."

whilst others, perhaps more sentimentally inclined, think of— "Ma chaumière et mon troupeau."

When the young French recruit joins his regiment, his first three months are employed in arduous drill, first in the barrack yard, and afterwards in the champ de manoeuvre. During these first three months, military instruction alone engrosses his time, and he learns the ecole du soldat, the ecole de peloton, the ecole des carrés, and the ecole de file, with the various sorts of marching, countermarching, and evolutions. The first part of his military education being completed, he may now be received into the regimental school, where he is instructed, if he desire it, in grammar, writing, arithmetic, geography, linear drawing, French composition, and book keeping. This school is under the special direction of two subalterns, who have been brought up at one or other of the military colleges. At the end of three months more, that is six months after joining, the young recruit may hope to be promoted to the rank of corporal, provided he possesses all the soldierly requisites. At the end of six months more he may he promoted to the rank of sergeant, or placed

as a clerk in one of the regimental offices. At the end of twelve months he may advance to the grade of sergeant fourrier; at the end of twelve other months, to that of serjeant-major; at the end of twelve more months he may become adjutant, which is the highest noncommissioned officership in the French service; and then he may be inscribed upon the tableau d'avancement, or promotion list for an ensigney. On obtaining this last-named grade, he receives from the War Office the sum of six hundred and sixty francs to equip himself, and the pay of fifteen hundred and ninety francs a year, every thing included.

It will be understood by our readers that this scale of rapid promotion, though open to all, turns to the profit really of only the comparatively few who are able to take advantage of it. Yet many more do so than would be the case with us, were the same opportunities of advancement offered to the English soldier, for two principal reasons-first, because the ranks of the French army are filled by a higher class of men than that which voluntary recruitment can furnish: and secondly, and chiefly because the whole military system of France was designed from the first to raise the soldier above the citizen, to form a super-eminent military aristocracy not only of the highest ennobled order, but also of a secondary popular grade. Marshal Soult, too, mindful, unlike many a novushomo, of his own bourgeois origin, military odessy, and dukely position, brought, whilst he was minister of war, all his energy and experience to the task of democratising the code he was appointed to administer. He takes the private soldier, as it were by the hand, and leads him on from step to step, from rank to rank, even when he joins bis regiment as an unsophisticated ploughboy or village ignoramus, until he polishes him on the regimental school bench, completes him in his martial exercises, passes him from the sentry box to the instruction field, thence to the accountant's office, thence to the paymaster's bureau, and thence to an ensign's commission in his own regiment, where he is received with cordiality by his new brother officers, after which, by time, conduct, or heroic actions, the epaulettes of a field officer may grace his shoulders, whilst stars and decorations shine refulgent on his breast.

The conscription, it will now be seen, is by no means the dreadful Scourge we have been accustomed to consider it. Our own pressgang practice, not yet abolished, and formerly in daily use, was violent and lawless in the extreme, when compared with the French obligatory mode of military enlistment. And we do not see how it is possible to keep up such a large force as that which France always requires, especially in an efficient state, by mere voluntary recruitment. Before the conscription existed, even after the feudal period of history had all but expired, volunteers composed the armies of the greater part of Europe; and France, then, at the outbreak of any new war, had all to learn afresh, as we have now, because her troops were, for the most part, raw levies, whilst she had even less of a central nucleus on which to form them than we have had since our regimental system, peculiar to the English service, has been matured into its present perfection. Her great military superiority U. S. MAG., No. 354, MAY, 1858.

I

is no doubt mainly owing to her legalised and minutely regulated method of compulsive enrolment. The whole most effective organization of the French army, in all its details, arises out of this one institution. There is danger indeed of its abuse in despotic nations, where the supreme power is under no sufficient popular control; and that Napoleon the First did abuse it, to the disturbance of all Europe, and to an extent that made it oppressive in the extreme to the whole Empire under his rule, there is no doubt. It gave him, in fact, such an unlimited draft on the population of France and of conquered countries, that the source whence his armies were supplied seemed so perennial and so exhaustless, as tempted him to undertake wars and indulge in visions of universal conquest which but for this, as it appeared, unfailing reservoir of soldiery, he never could have contemplated with a hope of success. It was particularly during the latter part of his reign that the conscription was felt to be an intolerable grievance. There was then such an incessant drain on the country for men,-chair a canon, cannon flesh as they were called-that there was hardly a family in France that had not to deplore the loss of sons or brothers. The whole land might be said to be in mourning, and the national glories, even before they were darkened with reverses, brought domestic grief to every hearth. Then it was that conscripts, fleeing from the ballot, or making their escape after having been duly passed, might be seen in groups, handcuffed and with ropes round their necks, dragged forward by the military police to join their regiments. A year or two after the battle of Waterloo, making a pedestrian tour through some of the southern provinces of France, we recollect being struck with the fact that there was not a young man, between the ages of 20 and 35, to be seen; there were boys-there were a fewer, middle aged-there were many old men; but the whole track we traversed seemed to be quite depopulated of its youthful manhood. It is, no doubt, the sore remembrance of this period that has attached such an odious sense to the conscriptive law. It was an exceptional period however, one not likely to have its parallel, perhaps for centuries again; and we repeat that in ordinary times even of arduous warfare, this law fulfils its object so completely, and weighs so lightly, that is, justly and equally in its national demands on the people, that the evils which may possibly, at the rarest crisis, result from it, are not to be compared with its permanent excellent operation.

An army of volunteers is doubtless, ceteris paribus, to be preferred to an army of pressed men, and may we ever preserve this superiority over our enemies. But what is not best, instead of being bad, may be second best-in some senses, the best absolutely; and we are quite sure that the French conscription, if it yields the palm to our mode of recruitment-which among European nations is practicable only in England-yields it to no other system that the world has ever known of raising a great military force, and of maintaining it in the highest state of efficiency.

ADEN AND THE ISLAND OF PERIM.

Some persons seem to be endowed with a natural facility for quarrelling, dependant possibly upon a peculiarity of organization, engendering and maintaining a constant morbid irritability. No responsibility attaches to such peculiarities. They are the idiosyncracies of the individual, ofttimes spreading to an entire family, sometimes extending to whole races and nations, It is the characteristic of imaginative and excitable people. Children and women are more mutable in their fancies than men, over whom reason holds a steadier sway, and in different. nations, we find a certain marked difference of type even in the rational man. What climate has to do in producing such difference we shall not pretend to say, or how far these results depend on diet and customs, induced by the greater or less perpendicularity with which the sun sheds its rays upon certain portions of the earth. Without hoping to explain the causes of this great variety in the mode of thinking exhibited by nations equally advanced in civilization, we must still admit the fact. We take perhaps, the most philosophic, as well as the most Christian view of the matter, when we attribute these differences to organization, and absolve individuals and nations so affected, from all responsibility. For ourselves, we are said to be, and we plead guilty to the charge, a hard-working, plodding, unimaginative people; in fact, a nation of shopkeepers. Our lively Celtic neighbours are a martial people, and the Gallic cock crows loud and long, whilst the British lion rarely roars, though he sometimes indulges in a low growl, whether derisive or defiant would be hard to say. Each nation has accepted its part in the great drama, and each is ticketed, so to speak, with certain characteristic qualities. But as in chemical experiments, the operator is often surprised to obtain results totally different from what he had expected; as he is astonished to discover that the alkalies have a metallic basis, so we find that in the camp and on the battle-field, our home-spun shopkeeping Englishman has the ring of true metal. Still we accept the character that has been given us, and yield the palm of brilliancy to our versatile neighbours. But in saying this, we do not mean to undervalue ourselves, and whilst acknowledging the excellencies of our Gallic friends, we lay claim to the possession of some few meritorious points. For example, if we boast little, we do a great deal. Though we offer no wordy ovations to the goddess Liberty, we have preserved for centuries the free institutions of our fathers, and are every day extending their influence; we talk little of equality, but our shopkeepers become nobles, and our aristocracy do not disdain to form matrimonial alliances with our merchants. We possess that true system of equalisation which is exhibited in the great works of nature herself, where we find continual motion maintaining constant equilibrium. Here, the perpetual plaint of the public voice resembles those airy tides, which under favouring circumstances, establish atmospheric salubrity. We know not the dread calm that precedes the hurricane

of tropical regions, and augur badly of nations where order is represented by military rule, and peace is only the suppression of opinion.

Accepting for ourselves the character of quiet, commercial plodders, we would still remind our poetical allies, that in the countries where our traders have built factories, our soldiers have never failed to maintain the supremacy of the British arms. We are not a captious people, and we regret that restless spirit of interference in our neighbours and allies, which forces us to assert our rights at the expense of wounding their vanity. Why this intermeddling in what don't concern them? The English have taken possession of the rocky island of Perim, and the French journalists are convulsed with indignation, We can very well understand how writers who are debarred the privilege of free discussion on domestic matters, will eagerly seize a foreign subject, on which they can ply their pens and pour the vial of their ink with impunity. On this abasement of a great national power-the press-we look with pitying regret, and regard the inflated invectives of the feuilletonists as a vent for the flatulent spasms begotten by a gagging bill.

For the information of our readers, who may not have turned their attention to this subject, we shall say a few words about the island of Perim and the locality in which it is situated. This same isle of Perim lies in the straits of Bab-el-Mandel, and is a barren rock, five miles in length, and hitherto frequented by fishers of turtle. The sudden notoriety which this desert spot has obtained must be attributed to the uneasy watchfulness of persons, who, have nothing to do with the matter, but the possession of the island, can only be a matter of importance to the English as protecting their commerce in the Red Sea, and increasing their facilities of communication with their eastern empire. We really do not understand that assumption of authority which presumes to dictate, where there is no right even to offer an opinion. We should be very dull indeed if we did not endeavour to overcome an obstacle, or profit of an advantage, that lay in our way. If there be any ruler possessing a right to dispute our possession of these few miles of rock, we shall know how to reply in a very convincing manner, but against foreign interposition we decidedly protest. Why the foreign journals should raise so mighty an uproar about this rock, we do not understand. Though barren and deserted, it can be made of importance to us, and was of no use to any of those rulers in the locality who might have laid claim to it. If the Sultan of Turkey or the Imaum of Muscat prove a right to Perim, we are able and willing to satisfy them; but we laugh at the very modest suggestion of referring the case to a Paris conference. Do the originators of such an idea suppose that all the other powers of Europe are willing to invest France with the character of political Areopagus, and submit to her decisions! Even the most heated brain could scarcely have engendered so wild a fancy, and yet the drift of some remarks offered on this question would seem to bear such a construction. We can smile at folly, but we know how to treat troublesome interference. The long mooted question of the Suez canal was troublesome enough, but it