Drink and the recruiting system.

Date:
[1867?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Drink and the recruiting system. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    DRINK AND THE RECRUITING SYSTEM. [The following leading articles from the Alliance News of Saturday, March 16th, and Saturday, April 13th, have such an important bearing upon questions now under the consideration of Parliament vitally affecting both our national morality and our national safety, that it has been considered advisable to republish them for more extensive circulation in this form.] First Article.—March 16th, 1867. Considering that drunkenness is the prevailing vice of the army, and the cause of most of the crimes committed in the army, it is a painful and remarkable fact that our recruiting system should be so arranged as to encourage this habit in our soldiers from the first moment of their enlistment. The decisive proof of the corrupting- influence of the system is that even steady non-commissioned officers are demoralised by it, and that commanding officers refrain from spoiling their best men by sending them on recruiting parties. How great, then, must be its pow7er over raw recruits at that impressible period of life when young men enter on their first employment, ready to be moulded by the example of new and more experienced associates ! It is a strange phenomenon that, while we spare neither pains nor expense to reclaim, in reformatories and penitentiaries, persons picked out of the streets, for whom w7e are not specially responsible, we deprave, by tempting them on their weakest point, our own young soldiers, the most helpless and dependent of the servants of the State. The key to this problem is to be found in the following questions addressed by the Earl of Dalhousie, the chairman of the last Recruiting Commission, to the Duke of Cambridge, and in His Royal Highness’s answers :—• 1407. Your Royal Highness must be aware that the mode of recruiting for the army at present is not the most creditable which might be observed in inducing young men to enter the service ?—Ho. 1408. Could your Royal Highness suggest any mode of improving that system?—I think that it would be impossible. With the volunteer system you must get the men where you can find them. Of course if you can get a better class of men so much the better, but our experience has not proved that we can do so; therefore my fear is that, do what you will, you must take what you can find, whether it is exactly what you wish or not.