all. The latter, as is the case in our regiments
of Foot Guards—which corps are always held up
as worthy of imitation by the rest of our army
—do not live in barracks. One subaltern officer
of each company has to attend the morning roll-
call of the men, and to make his report to the
captain of the day: of these captains there is one
on duty in each battalion. He has also to see the
distribution of provisions for the company; but
the cooking of them is left to the care of
the corporals of squads, who dine with the
men, and are held responsible for the cookery.
The sergeants are responsible for the clothes,
arms, and accoutrements of their respective
squads; and the sergeant-major of the
company has to draw the daily pay, and distribute
it to the company, under the supervision
of the captain. There is no paymaster,
properly so called, in a French regiment. The
duties of paying officer—officier payeur—are
discharged by a subaltern selected for the
purpose, whose rank and promotion go on in
the regular list, just as in our service the
adjutant rises among the subalterns. This
officer has no risk, and, although a good deal of
trouble, hardly any responsibility. The month's
pay for the regiment is received from the pay-
office of the district, and placed in the military
chest, of which there are three keys:
one kept by the colonel, one by the lieutenant-
colonel, and one by the officier payeur. Each
officer's gross pay is made over to him monthly,
and all deductions—which are very few in
the French army—he must make himself. The
net pay for the men of each company is given
out every third day to the captain of the
company, and by him immediately paid over to
the men he commands. Thus all the complicated
machinery of regimental paymasters, regimental
agents, regimental accounts, band funds,
mess funds, and the like, have no existence
whatever with our neighbours. Above all, those most
lamentable cases of fraud and deficiencies in
accounts, which are by no means unfrequent in our
service, are never heard of in the French army.
Who, having served ten years in the English
army, could not tell some sad tale respecting
paymasters or pay-sergeants, for whom the temptation
of handling such enormous sums as are kept
at their disposal has proved too great? In a
cavalry regiment in which I served some years in
India, I have known as much as sixty or seventy
thousand rupees (six thousand or seven thousand
pounds) in hard coin in the regimental chest at
a time, belonging to various regimental funds;
and for a troop sergeant-major to have four
hundred or five hundred rupees (forty or fifty
pounds) in his hands at a time was by no means
an uncommon circumstance. In that corps there
was never any dishonesty among either
commissioned or non-commissioned officers; but
is it always so? The London Guarantee
Society could reply in the negative, I believe.
One case in an infantry regiment then serving
in India I knew of. The paymaster of
the corps was taken ill, and was obliged to
go to England for his heallh. There was an
old lieutenant who had been very unfortunate
in his promotion, not being able to purchase,
and who was a very great friend of the
paymaster. The latter obtained leave for the old
lieutenant to act as his locum tenens during
the two years he was to be absent, on his (the
paymaster's) responsibility. The regimental
funds in the paymaster's hands were very large
indeed, but I do not remember the exact
amount. What did the acting paymaster, as
soon as ever he got command of these, but
lend out the money on interest to the native shrofs
or bankers of the place, at very high rates of
interest! Fortunately the speculation turned
out well, and the capital was all returned, as
well as the interest paid. If it had been otherwise,
where would the paymaster and his guarantees
have been? As it was, the acting
paymaster made enough money in two years to
purchase his company, his majority, and his
lieutenant-colonelcy, and died some years later
a major-general. I believe his case is by no
means an uncommon one in India. Sometimes
the money is not lent out at interest,
but is borrowed for racing, gambling, or the
like; and then come courts-martial, and
scandals innumerable. In the French army all
this is next to impossible; for, unless the colonel,
lieutenant-colonel, and the officier payeur, be in
collusion, not a single franc can be taken from the
chest without immediate discovery. Even if they
were agreed together to rob the government, the
fraud would be discovered at the end of a month;
for, every thirty days, an officer of the district
pay-office visits each corps, verifies in a couple
of hours all the very few and very simple accounts
of the past month, and then suiiphes the
funds for the coming month. Surely this is
better than our complicated system.

THE INNER WITNESS.

SIMPLICITY and sublimity go hand in hand.
It need not therefore surprise us to observe
how, in instances where every device suggestible
by human ingenuity has failed, some sudden,
quiet appeal to conscience or to nature has
resolved the most perplexing mystery. There are
cases within every one's recollection in which
all other means of arriving at the subtly hidden
truth were, almost to demonstration, exhausted.
All must remember questions so encumbered
with conflicting testimony—so clothed with
deeper darkness through the craft of paid
advocacy—that they had to be dismissed from earthly
tribunals to abide the fiat of the Judge who
never errs, before whom the inner witness, so
mute, so reticent here, speaks out unbidden.

Whether the machinery of modern law,
constructed, as it apparently is, with the view of
rendering as difficult as possible any appeal to
conscience, be wholly sound in principle, it does
not enter into our purpose to discuss. It is
impossible, however, not to admire the results
such appeals have produced; and the drawing
these, or some of them, into juxtaposition with
the issues of modern inquiry, may be neither
uninteresting nor uninstructive.