The Duke of Wellington says, speaking of the English
soldiers: 'It is most difficult to convict a prisoner before a
regimental court-martial, for, I am sorry to say, that soldiers have
little regard to the oath administered to them; and the officers who
are sworn well and truly to try and determine _according to the
evidence_, the matter before them, have too much regard to the strict
_letter_ of that administered to them.' Again: 'The witnesses being
in almost every instance common soldiers, whose conduct this tribunal
was instituted to control, the consequence is that perjury is almost
as common an offence as drunkenness and plunder, &c.'[21]
In the ordinary civil tribunals of Europe and America a man commonly
feels that, though he is removed far from the immediate presence of
those whose esteem is necessary for him, their eyes are still upon
him, because the statements he may give will find their way to them
through the medium of the press. This he does not feel in the civil
courts of India, nor in the military courts of Europe, or of any
other part of the world, and the man who judges of the veracity of a
whole people from the specimens he may witness in such courts, cannot
judge soundly.
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