_“Many, unable to undergo this trial and confounded by offended self-conceit and lacking the fortitude to sustain correction, forsake their master, who should not be eager to recall them. Others who learn from humiliation to distrust themselves should no longer have snares spread for their vanity. The master should speak to them neither with the severity of a censor nor with the haughtiness of a sophist, nor deal in harsh reproaches nor importunate complaints; his discourse should be the language of reason and friendship in the mouth of experience.”--Socrates._ INTRODUCTORY _“The test is as true of cerebral power, as if a hundred thousand men lay dead upon the field; or a score of hulks were swinging blackened wrecks, after a game between two mighty admirals.”--Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes._ (Opening Address at Morphy Banquet, Boston, 1859.) _Men whose business it is to understand war and warfare often are amused by senseless comparisons made by writers who, as their writings show, are ignorant even of the rudiments of military art and science. Of course a certain license in expression of thought is not to be denied the layman; he cannot be expected to talk with the exactness of the man who knows. At the same time there is a limit beyond which the non-technical man passes at his peril, and this limit is reached when he poses as a critic and presumes to dogmatize on matters in regard to which he is uninformed._ The fanciful conjectures of such people, well are illustrated by the following editorial _faux pas_, perpetrated by a leading metropolitan daily, viz.: “_Everyone knows now that a future war between states having similar and substantially equal equipments will be a different affair from any war of the past; characterized by a different order of generalship and a radically novel application of the principles of strategy and tactics._” Many in the struggle to obtain their daily bread, are tempted to essay the unfamiliar, and for a stipulated wage to pose as teachers to the public. Such always will do well to write modestly in regard to sciences which they have not studied and of arts which they never practiced, and especially in future comments on Military matters, such people may profit by the appended modicum of that ancient history, which newspaper men as a class so affect to despise, and in regard to which, as a rule, they are universally and lamentably, ignorant. What orders of Generalship can exist in the future, different from those which always have existed since war was made, viz.: good generalship and bad generalship? Ability properly to conduct an army is a concrete thing; it does not admit of comparison. Says Frederic the Great: “There are only two kinds of Generals--those who know their trade and those who do not.”