have some reason to expect that there are no services they would refuse. Here too we trace the partiality of your understanding. You take the sense of the army from the conduct of the guards, with the same justice with which you collect the sense of the people from the representation of the Ministry. Your marching regiments, Sir, will not make the guards their example either as soldiers or subjects. They feel and resent, as they ought to do, that invariable, undistinguishing favour with which the guards are treated;[1] while those gallant troops, by whom every hazardous, every laborious service, is performed, are left to perish in garrisons abroad, or pine in quarters at home, neglected and forgotten. If they had no sense of the great original duty they owe their country, their resentment would operate like patriotism,
- ↑ The number of commissioned officers in the guards are to the marching regiments as one to eleven:—the number of regiments given to the guards, compared with those given to the line, is about three to one, at a moderate computation; consequently, the partiality in favour of the guards is as thirty-three to one.—So much for the officers.—The private men have four-pence a-day to subsist on;and five hundred lashes if they desert. Under this punishment they frequently expire. With these encouragements, it is supposed, they may be depended upon, whenever a certain person thinks it necessary to butcher his fellow-subjects.
