ch an eventful past. I have of course no thought of sketching his
career or criticising his account of it. As to the point to which I
have referred, his claim that a peaceful American can be turned into
a soldier off-hand and that the West Pointers no more made good in the
war than did the civilians, he sets forth the case calmly. He takes
the curriculum at West Point as it was sixty years ago and plainly
shows that as regards acquirements in general it bears a poor
comparison with that of civilian universities and colleges of
that period. As to especial military education, he claims that the
instruction at West Point was comparatively trifling; the cadets were
well drilled only in the elements, while as regards the larger matters
of strategy and the management of armies there was slight opportunity
to learn. The cadet came out qualified to drill a company or at most
a regiment, while as to manoeuvring of divisions and corps he had no
chance to perfect himself. The cadet, moreover, had this handicap--he
had been made the slave of routine and his natural enterprise had been
so far repressed that he magnified petty details and precedents and
was slow to adapt himself to an unlooked-for emergency. He cites an
example where he himself was set to fight a battle by a West Point
superior with old-fashioned muzzle-loading guns, the improved arms
which were at hand and which might easily have been used with good
effect remaining in the rear. His conclusion is that a wide-awake
American trained in the hustle of daily life, with a good basis of
common sense and some capacity for adaptation, could, with a few
month's experience, undertake to good advantage the direction of
soldiers, and that the West Point preceding 1861 had an influence
rather nugatory in bringing about success. It is perhaps sufficient
answer to arguments of this kind that while during our Civil War there
was a most relentless sifting of men for high positions, little regard
being paid to the education and antecedents of those submitted to it,
the men who finally emerged at the front were almost exclusively West
Pointers. Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and Thomas, the Union champions
_par excellence_, were West Pointers. Lee, Stonewall Jackson,
the Johnstons, and Longstreet are no less conspicuous among the
Confederates. Civilians for the most part were not found in the high
places, or if they were so placed the results were unfortunate, as in
the cases of Butler, Bank