, not because it is an order.
With advancing experience his compliance increases, but it is still
because he better and better comprehends the reason. Give him an order
that looks utterly unreasonable,--and this is sometimes necessary,--or
give him one which looks trifling, under which head all sanitary
precautions are yet too apt to rank, and you may, perhaps, find that you
still have a free and independent citizen to deal with, not a soldier.
_Implicit_ obedience must be admitted still to be a rare quality in our
army; nor can we wonder at it. In many cases there is really no more
difference between officers and men, in education or in breeding, than
if the one class were chosen by lot from the other; all are from the
same neighborhood, all will return to the same civil pursuits side by
side; every officer knows that in a little while each soldier will again
become his client or his customer, his constituent or his rival. Shall
he risk offending him for life in order to carry out some hobby of
stricter discipline? If this difficulty exist in the case of
commissioned officers, it is still more the case with the
non-commissioned, those essential intermediate links in the chain of
authority. Hence the discipline of our soldiers has been generally that
of a town-meeting or of an engine-company, rather than that of an army;
and it shows the extraordinary quality of the individual men, that so
much has been accomplished with such a formidable defect in the
organization. Even granting that there has been a great and constant
improvement, the evil is still vast enough. And every young man trained
at West Point enters the service with at least this advantage, that he
has been brought up to command, and has not that task to learn.

He has this further advantage, that he is brought up with some respect
for the army-organization as it is, with its existing rules, methods,
and proprieties, and is not, like the newly commissioned civilian,
disposed in his secret soul to set aside all its proprieties as mere
"pipe-clay," its methods as "old-fogyism," and its rules as "red-tape."
How many good volunteer officers will admit, if they speak candidly,
that on entering the service they half believed the "Army Regulations"
to be a mass of old-time rubbish, which they would gladly reedit, under
contract, with immense improvements, in a month or two,--and that they
finally left the service with the conviction that the same book was a
mine of