Littell's Living Age/Volume 138/Issue 1777/Miscellany

Public Opinion and the German Army. — In countries where service is compulsory on all classes of society, every member of the commonwealth has a direct interest in the well-being of the army. The army is not an armed caste, it is a part of the body of the nation; through the gradations of the reserve and Landwehr men, the army fades away insensibly as it were into the general mass. It is the bond of union between the future generations and the past generations of the manhood of the country. Service may, it is true, be regarded as a severe tax; but, on the other hand, every one has to pay it in some shape or another. A man will not start in life quite so soon as he would otherwise have done, but at all events all start on even terms. It is difficult at first to realize the effect this has on the discipline of the army. In our own country desertion is, we are afraid, regarded by civilians (ignorant of the fact that ninety-nine men out of every hundred who desert are thieves as well as deserters) as a venial crime. A soldier who, in consequence of his insubordination, is committed to prison, and whose share of duty has to be undertaken by his comrades, is certainly not regarded as a criminal; but in Germany the man who offends against the military code, who refuses, by desertion, to do the part assigned to him; or who compels, it may be a neighbor, to do his duty for him by his absence from it, is considered to have committed an offence, not against the mere rules of discipline, but against the rest of his countrymen. Again, the territorial organization shows its value in this respect, as the public opinion of a locality from which a badly-conducted soldier has been drawn will be too strong for him on his return to allow such misbehavior to be practised with impunity. Macmillan's Magazine.

Privateering. — There has been some discussion on the possibility, in case of war with Russia, of the revival of the practice of issuing letters of marque. The public have been warned that "in a war between England and Russia the latter power will issue letters of marque to American adventurers and a swarm of 'Alabamas' may interrupt our commerce;" but, in reply to this suggestion, a correspondent of the Times writes to state that "the old practice of issuing letters of marque to the subjects of neutral States, by which they were authorized to carry on a sort of legalized piracy against the vessels and property of a nation with which they were not at war, had been abandoned and rigorously repressed long before the Declaration of Paris. In fact, no such letters of marque have been issued or accepted by neutrals in the present century." This may be true in the sense of the formal issue of such letters to subjects of neutral nations, but it is not true as to the general issue of letters of marque; for on April 17, 1861, the president of the Confederate States issued a proclamation offering letters of marque to all persons applying for them; and it appears that even Prussia, one of the signatories of the Declaration of Paris, which recites that "privateering is and remains abolished," in the course of the Franco-German war found herself, says Sir R. Phillimore, so pressed with the superiority of the French navy that she issued a decree for the purpose of creating a voluntary marine, which, according to that learned writer, it is very difficult to distinguish from the old system of privateering. With these examples before us, we cannot agree that "there is not the slightest probability" that privateering will be revived. Solicitors' Journal.