RECRUITING. 
69 
not fairly realise that at present we are not dealing with our soldiers 
as men and human beings, endowed with the same instinct and feelings 
as ourselves. Please do not misunderstand me. I believe I am the 
last person in this country to make that observation about the officers 
actually commanding. I have had the privilege of seeing a great deal 
of our troops and a great deal of the officers who command them and 
I think there is no person in this country who is less likely to make the 
mistake of believing that the moral side of the soldier's nature—and 
when I say the moral side, I mean as opposed to the mere physical 
side—is neglected by the officers. I believe the time the soldier spends 
in the regiment is probably often the best time the man ever spends in his 
life, and that most of whatever good he gets, is owing to the care that 
is taken by his officers that he shall spend his time well, and to his own 
advantage, I do believe we are wrong in our treatment of the soldier's 
life altogether, we are not regarding the personal element enough. 
What a Man will Die foe. 
After all we require men who have to undertake the hardest task in 
the world, and that is to die for an abstraction, to die young, and often 
to die “ without any gallery." In this country, the last-named is a 
qualification we are happily possessed of to a very large extent, 
the readiness, I mean to sacrifice our lives without any immediate 
observation being directed to our exploits, and without the certainty 
that anyone will even be aware of the sacrifice. It requires certain 
rather high qualities of the mind to make that sacrifice possible, and 
in our past history in some way or other, we have managed to insure 
that they shall be possessed by our soldiers. As far as my study of 
this matter goes, and of course it is not as valuable as that of a man 
who has had to face the trials himself, a man will die for various things. 
He will die for his religion; he will die for his country, he will die for 
his womankind, he will die for his duty. He will even die sometimes 
for fear of an excessive and brutal discipline, such a thing has 
happened, not seldom in the history of military operations. You may 
remember the remark of the sea captain, who threatened that if his 
crew did not take the French ship, he would “ flog them every one." 
And that analogy is not without its corresponding facts in the history 
of arms throughout the world. All of these things he will die for, 
and, above all, or rather not above all, but in addition to all these 
things, he will die because of the tradition of the regiment, or of the 
service to which he belongs (applause). Reading, as I did the other 
day, a very simple, a very straight-forward, but to me a very moving 
and interesting book, the life of Colonel Ewart, of the 78th, I under¬ 
stood, as I never understood quite so clearly before, what the life of a 
regiment means to the man who serves in it. When I read the account 
of the feeling in that regiment between man and man, when I read the 
account of the sympathy between officers and men, and when I read 
10 
