ime, and I
took every means in my power to bring them to the attention of the
proper authorities, State and National. At the close of 1862 a
commission was appointed by the Secretary of War to revise the
articles of war and army regulations. Of this commission
Major-General Hitchcock was chairman. They issued a circular calling
for suggestions as to alterations supposed to be desirable, and a
copy was sent to me among others. I took occasion to report the
results of my own experience, and to trace the evils which existed
to their sources in our military system. I called attention to the
striking parallel between our practices and those that had been in
use in the first French Republic, and to the identical mischiefs
which had resulted. Laxity of discipline, straggling, desertion,
demagoguery in place of military spirit, giving commissions as the
reward of mere recruiting, making new regiments instead of filling
up the old ones, absence of proper staff corps,--every one of these
things had been suffered in France till they could no longer be
endured, and we had faithfully copied their errors without profiting
by the lesson.

In the freedom of private correspondence with Mr. Chase I enlarged
upon the same topics, and urged him to get the serious attention of
the President and the cabinet to them. I gave him examples of the
mischiefs that were done by the insane efforts to raise new
regiments by volunteering when we ought to apply a conscription as
the only fair way of levying a tax on the physical strength of the
nation. I said: "I have known a lieutenant to be forced by his
captain (a splendid soldier) to resign on account of his general
inefficiency. I have seen that same lieutenant take the field a few
months later as lieutenant-colonel of a new regiment, whilst the
captain still stood at the head of his fraction of a company in the
line. This is not a singular instance, but an example of cases
occurring literally by the thousand in our vast army during the year
past.... Governor Tod (of Ohio) said to me some time ago, with the
deepest sorrow, that he was well aware that in raising the new
regiments by volunteering, the distribution of offices to the
successful recruiters was filling the army with incompetent men whom
we should have to sift out again by such process as we could!....
Have we time for the sifting process? Even if we had, how
inefficient the process itself when these officers have their
commissions in