have served not less than two years with their companies. The cadets should be chosen as nearly as possible in equal numbers from the various regiments, should be bona fide soldiers-not clerks or "general service men"-and the recommendations of the company commanders, called for from headquarters, should be only preliminary to a competitive examination, in which, however, good service marks ought to be considered. I believe such a scheme as this has never been formally proposed in Congress, except when it was offered last winter by the senior Senator from Pennsylvania.* That so obvious a reform should not have been noticed, either by the numerous officers whose views upon the subject of army reorganization have been given officially for the information of Congress, or by the joint committee on reorganization, whose labors last summer proved so abortive, is probably due to the settled conviction that Representatives will not consent to surrender their patronage in the nomination of cadets. Of course, it must be admitted that the new system is based upon the assumption that the enlistment of a sufficient number of well-educated young men will be stimulated by the enactment of a law requiring all appointments to the Military Academy to be made from the army. That, with the general diffusion of education, which is the distinctive feature of our society, there should not be among the enlisted men of the army a class fit to be sent to West Point, would, if true, be the strongest evidence that some measure is needed to raise the standard of recruits. Those who advocate this reform must not be misunderstood as implying that the academy is now turning out an inferior class of officers. But that the graduates of West Point are, as a class, so meritorious, must be placed to the credit of the high character of instruction and discipline which is maintained at our military school, and in part to the natural aptitude of our race for the military profession, instead of to any commendable feature in the present system of selection by political favor. The mode of appointment now pursued gives us a corps of cadets who possess precisely the average capacity of our fairly educated youth for the soldier's profession. Surely something better than mediocrity of talent, or average fitness for a military career, should be sought in those who are to be favored with an elaborate education at the * Amendment to the Army Appropriation Bill proposed by Senator Wallace, February 15th, 1879. public expense, and some of whom are in due course to rise to the command of our army. A veteran soldier once wrote:† "Practice and study may make a good general, as far as the handling of troops and the designing of a campaign, but that ascendancy of spirit which leads the wise and controls the insolence of folly is a rare gift of nature." One of the vital faults of the system of political appointments by which our army is officered—a fault which the competitive examination plan does not obviate-is that it affords no means of getting at those moral qualities which are of the highest importance in the soldier, and of surpassing value in those who are to command soldiers. Courage, fortitude, endurance, will-power-all the faculties which are most needed in time of service-may or may not be found in the cadet as now chosen. But after one or two campaigns the captain will know which of his company have the right sort of stamina for a military career, and the nomination of the immediate commander will be of inestimably more value, in a military sense, than graduating with honor from any school whatever. A controlling reason why the present system of obtaining officers for our army should be abandoned is that it is not consistent with the genius of our institutions: we have no aristocracy and are supposed to have perfect equality of rights and privileges. The aristocratic feature of our army is the chief cause of the popular prejudice against it, and therefore of its principal dangers at the hands of the Legislature. The lamented Colonel C. C. Chesney wrote, that Decisive success has in all ages followed the combi"nations of great commanders; and victory in the long run has "seldom failed to pay homage to science." No nation can hope to always have a great commander at the head of its armies, but the chances of having a competent one will be vastly improved by enlarging the area of selection for officers by throwing open the cadetships to be competed for by the whole army. Each officer will then be the product of a competition in actual service between tens and perhaps hundreds of soldiers actuated by an ambition which is now wholly absent from our army and which cannot fail to immeasurably improve its morale. That the most intelligent government cannot expect to always have a great commander at the head + Major-General Sir W. F. P. Napier, K. C. B. “ History of the War in the Pe ninsula." of its army is because real genius is as rare among soldiers as elsewhere, and because there is no means of discerning it in time of peace; but there is no excuse for giving the general, when war comes, an army of inferior material, badly organized and disciplined. History teaches clearly how the maximum of effectiveness can only be obtained, and it is this science of organization which it is the duty of the statesman to understand, and to neglect which is not only to waste the money expended on the military establishment but to criminally invite the greatest disasters which can befall a nation. The Duc de Fezensac, in his interesting Recollections of the Grand Army,* recounts how, when he joined his regiment in the camp at Boulogne as a private soldier, his father's friend, Colonel Lacuée, said: "If I consulted only my attachment to you and your family, I would make you my secretary and keep you personally about me. But for the sake of your own career, you must learn to know those whom you will one day command; and the way to do that is to live among them. By doing this you will learn to know their virtues; otherwise you will only know their vices." Sound ideas for a Republican army, even if uttered by a nobleman to a scion of an hereditary nobility! How much the sounder to Americans, whose ideas of human equality are rather taken from the Puritans of the English Commonwealth than from the aristocratic powers whose military systems we have servilely copied. We cannot find a better model to form on than that Army of the Commonwealth, which, as Macaulay has told us, was well paid, and in which the soldier had a chance of promotion; nor can we find a better maxim than the words of Cromwell to Hampden: "A "few honest men are better than numbers." And if we reform and reorganize our army upon such a model, it may happen that some future historian will be able to record of it, as Forster † does of that organized by Oliver, that " They never were beaten." I. N. BURRITT, Late Captain Pennsylvania Volunteers. *Souvenirs Militaires de 1804 à 1814." Par M. le Duc de Fezensac, Général de Division. + "Lives of the Statesmen of the Commonwealth." By John Forster. SUMMER MUSINGS. (From the German.) H! wend thy way to sylvan shades, To verdant hedge and dark-hued oak; For there, in whispers soft and low, Can earth afford thee greater joy The forest, ringing with the sound, S. A. S. IN THE LANGUAGE OF ANIMALS. N these Darwinian days, the study of animals, of their mental and moral characteristics, has acquired an interest which it had not for our ancestors. The mere suggestion of our relationship has made such studies assume, in a measure, the air of a genealogical investigation. There is no doubt that the comparative anatomists have demonstrated our physical alliance with the animals, and that, with modifications, all the varieties of vertebrates have arisen from the same central idea. That the hoof of the horse should by infinite gradations be connected with the complex mechanism of the human hand, appears impossible to any one who has not followed the steps by which the connection has been traced. Has our complex speech arisen in the same way? The philologists oppose the opinion that it has. Max Müller speaks thus of what he calls the Bow-wow theory, and the Pooh-pooh theory, by which the origin of language was sought to be explained. According to the first, roots are the imitations of sounds; according to the second, they are involuntary interjections. The first theory was very popular among the philosophers of the eighteenth century, and as it is still held by many distinguished scholars and philosophers, we must examine it more carefully. It is supposed, then, that man, being as yet mute, heard the voices of birds and dogs and cows, the thunder of the clouds, the roaring of the sea, the rustling of the forest, the murmurs of the brook and the whisper of the breeze. He tried to imitate these sounds, and finding his mimicking cries useful as signs of the objects from which they proceeded, he followed up the idea and elaborated language. This view was most ably defended by Herder."* The interjectional theory claimed that we could not suppose man to have been mute, while all other animals made sounds, since he, as well as they, has the organs for expressing his emotions, and from the cries, groans, interjections and other sounds which he made, it was argued that language slowly arose. Müller's answer to these theories is this: "If the constituent elements of human speech were either mere cries, or the mimicking of the cries of nature, it would be difficult to understand why brutes should be without a language. There is not only the parrot, but the mocking bird and others, which can imitate most successfully both articulate and inarticulate sounds; and there is hardly an animal without the faculty of uttering interjections, such as huff, hiss, baa, etc. It is clear also that if what puts a perfect distinction betwixt man and brutes is the having of general ideas, language which arises from interjections and from the imitation of *It is but just to mention that Herder afterwards abandoned it and accepted the theory of the divine origin of language. |