certain family ties, or private concerns, may imperatively forbid their joining the service at the last moment, and it would be far better that they should withdraw betimes from the engagement. For it should be borne in mind that these bodies are volunteers, in the strictest sense of the term; their presence or continuance in the field cannot be constrained. The effort to bear all the trials and hardships of a campaign requires a patience and endurance which will yield, even where there is thorough ardour in the cause, and great personal courage, unless supported by physical strength. The Volunteer Corps is a service in which the country must trust entirely to the honour of the individuals composing it; and certainly, those who shall stand the test will be peculiarly entitled to the gratitude of the nation.
But while deprecating the employment in the field of any volunteers who are not hardy and trained soldiers, or who have households to protect and business to attend to, we must not be supposed to recommend the withdrawal from the ranks of all who are not available for actual service with regular troops: far from it. There is not a man who has been drilled as a volunteer but may be serviceable to the community in a variety of ways at home, by supplying the place of regular soldiers in mounting guard as sentries, acting as "orderlies" for transmitting orders between the government officers and head-quarters, as assistants in the hospital service, as extra clerks in the commissariat and other departments, and in serving as a military police. Indeed good service might be rendered to the country by gentlemen of character, ability, and intelligence, sufficiently au fait to the business of a soldier to execute with military precision and promptitude such duties as would not involve any greater amount of fatigue and exposure than a man of average health and strength could sustain without injury: they would form a bodyguard, composed of fathers of families and the younger and less robust of the volunteers, for the protection of their homes and maintaining the peace of cities and towns; and competent to fill offices of trust in connection with the military and civil authorities. The country would thus derive the full benefit of the services of every volunteer in the kingdom; and no man who had entered the ranks but would have the satisfaction of knowing that he was serving his Queen and Country in the most effective way.
