ganization, of which it should be the vital principle. The French, gifted with instinct for war, and being troubled with scant prejudice against concentration, civil as well as military, soon abandoned, when they found its futility, the idea of defending their Algerian frontier by extended lines, block-houses, and feeble intrenched posts. They wisely established, at the centres of action, depots, magazines, and all the requisites for supporting large bodies of men, making them pivots for expeditionary columns, which by good military roads could be thrown in overwhelming numbers, in the best health and in the highest discipline, wherever an attack or an insurrectionary movement required crushing.
The necessity of so doing has long occurred to the American government, in whose service at present "a regiment is stationed to-day on the borders of tropical Mexico; to-morrow, the war-whoop, borne on a gale from the northwest, compels its presence to the frozen latitudes of Puget's Sound." The objections to altering their present highly objectionable system are two: the first is a civil consideration, the second a military one.
As I have remarked about the centralization of troops, so it is with their relation to civilians; the Anglo-Scandinavian blood shows similar manifestations in the Old and in the New Country. The French, a purely military nation, pet their army, raise it to the highest pitch, send it in for glory, and when it fails are to its faults a little blind. The English and Anglo-Americans, essentially a commercial and naval people, dislike the red coat; they look upon, and from the first they looked upon, a standing army as a necessary nuisance; they ever listen open-eared to projects for cutting and curtailing army expenditure; and when they have weakened their forces by a manner of atrophy, they expect them to do more than their duty, and if they can not command success, abuse them. With a commissariat, transport, and hospitals—delicate pieces of machinery, which can not run smoothly when roughly and hurriedly put together—unaccustomed to and unprepared for service, they land an army 3000 miles from home, and then make the world ring with their disappointment, and their complainings anent fearful losses in men and money. The fact is that, though no soldiers in the world fight with more bravery and determination, the Anglo-Scandinavian race, with their present institutions, are inferior to their inferiors in other points, as regards the art of military organization. Their fatal wants are order and economy, combined with the will and the means of selecting the best men—these belong to the emperor, not to the constitutional king or the president—and most of all, the habit of implicit subjection to the commands of an absolute dictator. The end of this long preamble is that the American government apparently thinks less of the efficiency of its troops than of using them as escorts to squatters, as police of the highway. Withal they fail; emigrants will not be escorted; women and children will struggle when they
