imly made
the best of it, though he unwaveringly condemned some of its most
conspicuous provisions. His business was to retrieve his blunder of
the previous year, and he was successful. Imperfect as it was, the
Conscription Act, with later supplementary legislation, enabled him to
replace the wastage of the Union armies and steadily to augment them.
At the close of the war, the Union had on foot a million men with an
enrolled reserve of two millions and a half, subject to call.

* The battle over conscription in England was anticipated in
America sixty-four years ago. Bagot says that the average
British point of view may be expressed thus: "What I am
sayin' is this here as I was a sayin' yesterday." The
Anglo-Saxon mind is much the same the world over. In
America, today, the enemies of effective military
organization would do well to search the arguments of their
skillful predecessors in 1888, who fought to the last ditch
for a military system that would make inescapable "peace at
any price." For the modern believers in conscription, one
of their best bits of political thunder is still the defense
of it by Lincoln.

The Act provided for a complete military census, for which purpose the
country was divided into enrollment districts. Every able-bodied
male citizen, or intending citizen, between the ages of twenty and
forty-five, unless exempted for certain specified reasons, was to be
enrolled as a member of the national forces; these forces were to be
called to the colors--"drafted," the term was--as the Government found
need of them; each successive draft was to be apportioned among the
districts in the ratio of the military population, and the number
required was to be drawn by lot; if the district raised its quota
voluntarily, no draft would be made; any drafted man could offer a
substitute or could purchase his discharge for three hundred dollars.
The latter provision especially was condemned by Stanton. It was seized
upon by demagogues as a device for giving rich men an advantage over
poor men.

American politics during the war form a wildly confused story, so
intricate that it cannot be made clear in a brief statement. But
this central fact may be insisted upon: in the North, there were two
political groups that were the poles around which various other groups
revolved and combined, only to fly asunder and recombine, with all the
maddening inconst