But beside this, there is a greater grievance. It is that ours is as aristocratic an army as any in the world, and that the distance of the officers from the enlisted men is so great as to be simply immeasurable. Volunteers used to grumble that some of their officers “put on airs.” It is scarcely fair to say that regular officers put on airs, but it certainly is true that the enlisted man, as a rule, is generally treated by his superiors as a being of an entirely different order. Few men rise from the ranks. Some men now high up on regimental rosters used to be private soldiers, and a few instances of the kind occur nowadays, but the vacancies are too few to attract good men to the ranks. Let any one live at a military post a little while and explain, if he can, how any one with sufficient self-respect to be fit for military rank of any kind can bring himself to enlist in the United States army at all. All this could be changed, without increasing the numerical strength of the army, by an entire change of method which would not create any friction, disorganization or reorganization, but which nevertheless would encourage a better class of young men to enlist--a change which, indeed, would secure some of the very best in the country. An army so small as ours should be in the highest sense a military school. There is nothing to prevent it. There is no army which has more leisure at its disposal or officers more competent to act as instructors. No army in the world has a greater percentage of highly educated officers. No country can show a larger proportion of well-educated, restless, unemployed, aspiring young men. There is no engineering party for a railroad, a mine, a river improvement association, a drainage company or anything else requiring applied mathematical and mechanical skill but can secure a large staff of intelligent young men at an expense not exceeding that of the ordinary soldier. These men generally work harder and fare worse, regarding personal comfort, than the meanest of soldiers, yet they are not only entirely satisfied with their chance, but elbow each other fiercely in their desire to get it.