ABSTRACT
Of late years there has been a marked improvement among our soldiers’ wives, because there has been a marked improvement among our soldiers themselves. These two facts stand to one another in the relation of cause and effect, and the remark, we believe, extends to the whole British army, though it has been more immediately suggested by our knowledge of the character and habits of the household troops. There are ruffians and desperadoes amongst them, no doubt, as the defaulters’ books and the police reports prove; but we question whether six thousand better conducted men could be selected from the same class in any part of the United Kingdom. This moral improvement has been owing to different causes. The great sympathy shown for them and their wives and children during the Crimean war, softened their hearts; the truths of religion preached by earnest and devoted chaplains obtained the mastery over many minds; the establishment of reading rooms, soldiers’ clubs and institutes, and the regulation now enforced in several of our battalions that every soldier must attend the regimental school till he obtains a certificate that he can read and write;—all these causes have united in making our soldiers something different from those old ruffians who were almost as terrible to their friends as to their enemies. Whoever remembers the character and habits of the old pensioners, scattered through our villages, some thirty years ago, will admit that this language is not exaggerated.
