Travellers in the United States make great fun of the profusion of colonels and generals, and tell ludicrous stories on the subject. There is also talk of the absurd number of officers in the Spanish-American armies, but we should not, by any means, confound the two things. In the United States it is merely a harmless exhibition of vanity, and an amusing comment on their own high-minded abnegation of mere titles. In Spanish America it indicates a very real and serious evil indeed. Don Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, in his statistical chart for 1856, quoted above, estimates the soldiers in the Republic at 12,000, and the officers at 2,000, not counting those on half-pay. One officer to every six men; and among them sixty-nine generals. These are not mere militia heroes, walking about in fine uniforms, but have actual commissions from some one of the many governments that have come and gone, and are entitled to their pay, which they get or do not get, as may happen. Only a fraction of them know anything whatever about the art of war. They were political adventurers, friends or relatives of some one in power, or simply speculators who bought their commissions as a sort of illegitimate Government Annuities. The continual rebellions or pronunciamientos have increased the number of officers still further. Comonfort’s notion of degrading all the officers of the rebel army was a new and bold experiment. A very common course had been, when a pronunciamiento had been made anywhere against the then existing government, and a revolutionary army had been raised, for an amalgamation to take place between the two forces; intrigue and bribery and mutual disinclination to fight bringing matters to this peaceful kind of settlement. In this case, it was usual for the rebel officers to retain their self-conferred dignities. I think this body of soldierless officers is one of the most troublesome political elements at work in the Republic. The political agitators are mostly among them; and it is they, more than any other class, who are continually stirring up factions and making pronunciamientos (what a pleasant thing it is that we have never had to make an English word for “pronunciamiento”). Several times, efforts have been made to reduce the Army List to decent proportions, but a fresh crop always springs up. In the “lowest depth” of mismanagement to which Mexican military affairs have sunk, the newspapers still triumphantly refer to countries which surpass them in this respect, and, at the time of our arrival, were citing the statistics of the Peruvian Republic, where there are a general and twenty officers to every sixty soldiers, and as many naval officers as seamen.