To govern those whose mental and physical energies we require for our subsistence and support by the lash alone is so easy, so simple a mode of bending them to our will, and making them act strictly and instantly in conformity to it, that it is not at all surprising to find so many of those who have been accustomed to it, and are not themselves liable to have the lash inflicted upon them, advocating its free use.  In China the Emperor has his generals flogged, and finds the lash so efficacious in bending them to his will that nothing would persuade him that it could ever be safely dispensed with.  In some parts of Germany they had the officers flogged, and princes and generals found this so very efficacious in making those act in conformity to their will that they found it difficult to believe that any army could be well managed without it.  In other Christian armies the officers are exempted from the lash, but they use it freely upon all under them; and it would be exceedingly difficult to convince the greater part of these officers that the free use of the lash is not indispensably necessary, nay, that the men do not themselves like to be flogged, as eels like to be skinned, when they once get used to it.  Ask the slave-holders of the southern states of America whether any society can be well constituted unless the greater part of those upon the sweat of whose brow the community depends for their subsistence are made by law liable to be bought, sold, and driven to their daily labour with the lash; they will one and all say No; and yet there are doubtless many very excellent and amiable persons among these slave-holders.  If our army, as at present constituted, cannot do without the free use of the lash, let its constitution be altered; for no nation with free institutions should suffer its soldiers to be flogged. ’Laudabiliores tamen duces sunt, quorum exercitum ad modestiam labor et usus instituit, quam illi, quorum milites ad obedientiam suppliciorum formido compellit.’[36]

Though I reprobate that wanton severity of discipline in which the substance is sacrificed to the form, in which unavoidable and trivial offences are punished as deliberate and serious crimes, and the spirit of the soldier is entirely disregarded, while the motion of his limbs, cut of his whiskers, and the buttons of his coat are scanned with microscopic eye, I must not be thought to advocate idleness.  If we find the sepoys of a native regiment, as we sometimes do at a healthy and cheap station, become a little unruly like schoolboys, and ask an old native officer the reason, he will probably answer others as he has me by another question, ’Ghora ara kyun?  Pani sara kyun?’ ’Why does the horse become vicious?  Why does the water become putrid?’-For want of exercise.  Without proper attention to this exercise no regiment is ever kept in order; nor has any commanding officer ever the respect or the affection of his men unless they see that he understands