The age-herald., 1899-11-05

had even hoped that he would have found time to indite a study of the succession of the campaigns alike on the Potomac and the Mississippi, and the great march through Georgia But as we were not to have that he gives us lead to his views on the various phases of the operations which took such a long time and cost so much blood and treasure, partly through sheer inaptitude and partly through unpre- paredness. The main lesson Lord Wolseley would drive home is that if there had been a single army corps in the hands of the Washington statesmen the secession move- ment would have been crushed before the year of it's inception was out.
 The second is-and his point is empha- sized by the experience of the United States in the recent Spanish war-that civil- ian administration is not efficient and that interference with the general selected for any special mission is sure to be disastrous. It is an old story with Lord Wolseley that the army in constitutional countries is too often made the battlefield of rival politic- ians, and at the same time he would be one of the first to admit that statesmen and not soldiers must decide when and in some measures how, the army must be em- ployed in the interests of the people. He has also before drawn the perfectly true lesson that volunteers, newly raised or half-trained, cannot be depended upon in tough fighting, while in the interests both of the nation and the private soldier it is of the first importance that the officers should be thoroughly expert in their work since a lack of judgment at a critical mo- ment may induce a panic which would lead to the destruction of the army and might involve peril to the nation.
 The lesson of the American civil war that is most telling is that the volunteers who bolted at Bull Run were just the same class of men those who, when trained. march ed calmly to death in the Richmond Penin- sua and over the bluffs of Vicksburg. The meddlesomeness of the politicians. both in the north and in the south, was responsible for great, grievous and unnecessary delays. for the prolonga ton of human suffering and the waste of millions of treasure. McClel- Ian had to train his soldiers, when they ought to have been fighting, and Lee and Jackson had to put up with alterations of their dispositions made by Mir Benjamin, who, though very able lawyer, was as ig- norant as a child of the merest elements of warfare.
 Lord Wolseley says that he knows of 'no book which will add more largely to the soldiers knoweldge of strategy and the art of war" and every competent critic Will endorse the encomium. We will add simple extract from the commander-in- chiefT introduction:
 ."rhe soldier knows that his art is most difficult; that to apply strategical principles correctly, experience, study, knowledge of men, and an intimate ac- ouaintance with questions of supply trans port and the movement of masses are ab- solutely necessary.
 "IIe is aware that what may seem mat ters of small moment to the civilian-sucn as the position of a brigade, the strength of A garrison, the command of a detach- ment-may affect the whole course of campaign, and, consequently, even If ne had not the historic examples or Auhc Councils and other such assemblies to warn him. he would rebel against the meddling of amateurs.
 Let it not be forgotten that an enor- nous responsibility rests on the shoulders of a commander in the field the honor or the army committed to his charge, the lives of the brave men under him, perhaps tAe existence of his country; and that failure, even if he can plead that he only obeyed the orders of his government, or that ne was supplied with inadequate means, Will be laid at his door,