Standish O'Grady; selected essays and passages

240 STANDISH O GRADY
find it SO hard to enforce discipline, setting about it in the
right way. When men feel that they are treated with
justice and kindness, when they know that they are
managed towards some good end, not towards the accu-
mulation of pelf, they will submit, and that with alacrity,
to the most rigorous discipline. Moreover, I presume
that your gangers, bosses, or whatever your officers may
be called, will, like yourself, inspire a personal affection,
a personal respect and fear. Till you have effected this
you have effected nothing. The power of dismissal being
your only Mutiny Bill, you will have to work by methods
nobler, if for some natures less effective than those of the
brutal drill-sergeant, i.e., by methods worthy of free men.
Yet, without the lash, the treadmill, solitary confinement,
or the death-sentence, you will find that you can, if made
of the right stuff, apply and maintain discipline more
rigorous and more gladly endured than that kept up by
physical force. I can imagine your men dreading a word
from you, or a look more than a cut from a whip. These
things, thank God ! are in human nature, though deep
down there all unsuspected, and it is your task to bring
them out. You can only evolve feelings of the kind on
the old conditions—conditions well understood by all
the great captains and natural leaders of men ; well
understood, too, by all that old fighting chieftainry of
Ireland, and, if holy Ireland is not to go back to bogdom
and wolfdom, must be understood again. Your men
will love you and fear you if you have sufficient mettle
of the right sort, and are leading them by just methods
towards high and generous ends. Once provoke that