omotion.

It has been alleged by many of the opponents of the West Point Academy,
that military instruction is of little or no advantage to a
general;--that in the wars of Napoleon, and in the American Revolution,
and the American war of 1812, armies were generally led to victory by
men without a military education, and unacquainted with military
science;--and that in the event of another war in this country, we must
seek our generals in the ranks of civil life, rather than among the
graduates of our Military Academy.

The objection here made to military education will hold with equal
force against education in any other profession. We sometimes find men
who have become eminent in the pulpit and at the bar, or in medicine and
the sciences, without ever having enjoyed the advantages of an education
in academic or collegiate halls, and perhaps even without that
preliminary instruction usually deemed necessary for professional
pursuits. Shall we therefore abolish all our colleges, theological
seminaries, schools of law and medicine, our academies and primary
schools, and seek for our professional men among the uneducated and the
ignorant? If professional ignorance be a recommendation in our generals,
why not also in our lawyers and our surgeons? If we deem professional
instruction requisite for the care of our individual property and
health, shall we require less for guarding the honor and safety of our
country, the reputation of our arms, and the lives of thousands of our
citizens?

But in reality, were not these men to whom we have alluded eminent in
their several professions _in spite of,_ rather than _by means of_ their
want of a professional education? And have not such men, feeling the
disadvantages under which they were forced to labor, been almost without
exception the advocates of education in others?

But is it true that most of the generals of distinction in the more
recent wars were men destitute of military education,--men who rose from
the ranks to the pinnacle of military glory, through the combined
influence of ignorance of military science and contempt for military
instruction? Let us glance at the lives of the most distinguished of the
generals of the French Revolution, for these are the men to whom
reference is continually made to prove that the Military Academy is an
unnecessary and useless institution, the best generals being invariably
found in the ranks of an army, and _not_ in the ranks of milit