a power which the warrior nations of the world must take into account. In the tactics displayed by the American and British armies there is naturally a more proper ground for comparison than in the strategy of the two recent campaigns. Strategy is necessarily the variable quantity depending on combinations of conditions; but tactics, as the immediate methods of accomplishing the requirements of strategy, are to be judged by the invariable gauge of practicalness. The tactics of the American soldier have been the outcome of generations of Indian wars and of fighting in woods and mountains. Our colonial forefathers established the general principles of our present fighting methods when they learned the art of warfare from the natives of the wilderness. When Colonel Washington saved General Braddock’s defeated British regulars from annihilation by the Indians, he employed, in the main, the same tactics we now use. Washington implored the British general to dispose his men like the pioneer volunteers, as individual fighters; but the Royal officer disdained to take lessons from a colonial. The British stubbornness was in the end fortunate for the colonies, for the American victories of the War of Independence were won by the common-sense tactics natural to men who had handled long rifles from their boyhood, and who had learned to hide first and shoot afterwards. The slaughter of the retreat from Concord to Boston, the terrible losses at Bunker Hill, the defeats at Bennington and Saratoga, were the work of men who sighted their foe with the same precision that they aimed at wildcats, and took as few chances as possible themselves. During that war an attempt was made by Washington to introduce the Prussian tactics into the continental army. Baron Steuben drilled the raw frontiersmen according to the rules of the Great Frederick, and the result was unquestionably advantageous, as the men gained military form and learned discipline. Had the Boers submitted themselves to such discipline and obedience to commanders, had they been content to do more “team work” and less determined to fight as individuals, they might not have lost their positions. But the American continental, with all his new-fangled discipline, never forgot that he was out to kill rather than to drill; he was a hunter, and the pomp of volley firing never led him to waste powder and ball. He kept his head, and his finger stayed on the trigger until the sights on the rifle had a perfect alignment on a red coat.