Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/140

 cities, or scattered over the hillsides of Judea, the task of ruling them would have been easy. But they were a people without a country, and not yet even organized into a nation, but mustered in one vast camp, through which rebellion might spread in a day. Moses had to govern them by his single will. He had to do everything: to direct their marches, to order their battles, and even to provide for their subsistence; while all the time rose up around him, like the roaring of the sea, the factions and jealousies of the different tribes.

To preserve order among themselves, and to guard against hostile attacks, all the men capable of bearing arms were organized as a military body. They marched in armed array, and pitched their tents around the standards of their tribes. For the safety of this mighty host, Moses had to issue strict orders, such as all commanders publish to their armies. In every military code, the first requirement is subordination to the chief. Rebellion threatens the very existence of an army. Whoever, therefore, attempts to stir a whole camp to rage and mutiny, must expect to be given up to instant death. In this Moses only enforced the ordinary laws of war. In an age when we have seen men blown away from guns — as in the Indian Mutiny, for acts of mutiny and massacre, or by Wellington for the lesser offence of pillage — we need not be troubled to answer for undue severity in Moses in dealing with what threatened anarchy, and if unchecked, would bring inevitable destruction. He suppressed rebellion as Cromwell would have suppressed it: he not only put it down, but stamped it out, and such prompt severity was the truest humanity.

But it is not acts of military discipline that provoke the criticism of modern humanitarians, so much as those religious laws which prescribed the God whom the