ABSTRACT
The question of the advisability and possibility of allowing soldiers to marry, is no doubt a difficult one for the authorities to deal with. Although, of course, when a man enlists into the Army, he enters into a tacit agreement with his country, for a certain period at all events to hold himself in a state of single-blessedness, yet, after the lapse of a few years, when any attraction the profession might have once possessed has worn off, and the soldier comes to regard his life as one of dull and hopeless routine, the idea of marrying generally takes hold of him, and he is not easily to be baulked in the carrying out of his design. According to the regulations now in force, five men in every hundred soldiers may have wives who are officially recognised and cared for, but in every regiment in the Service there are numbers, we might almost write, hundreds, of men married “without leave,” and the wives of these last are the persons towards the amelioration of whose forlorn and hopeless condition we urge that something should be done.
