Suppose that instead of selecting men merely for their physical quality and their supposed capacity for obedience, the standard of admission to the ranks of the army should be as high as that of admission to West Point. Suppose the Government were to assure the people that the recruits would be treated as well as the cadets at the military or naval academy; in an instant the army might have its choice from a hundred thousand intelligent, well-born, well-bred, honorable, aspiring young men. As already said, there is no trouble in getting any quantity of men of this class to go out under the control of engineers for hard and unpleasant duty. The inducement, beside the financial compensation, is that they will be enabled to fit themselves, at least to some extent, for the class of work which their superiors are already engaged in. They are close observers, earnest students, intelligent assistants, and the beginning of many an engineer, now prominent, has been in just such parties. The United States army might as well be one great school of engineering and military tactics. It is well known that the mere company drill, which is almost all the drill the American soldier is ever subjected to, thanks to the distribution of the force in such a way that scarcely any regiment has been together within a single period of enlistment of any soldier in the army, requires very little time. It is no harder to become proficient in than that of the militia of the various States and cities. Indeed, with company drills once a week, almost any militia regiment or company can present a finer appearance upon parade than any but two or three “show” companies of regulars. The remainder of military life consists in guard duty, the details of camp duty and of applied engineering, which each man can learn as rapidly by experience as an equal number of assistants in a construction party anywhere else. It is known well enough at the West that the construction parties of railways contain, beside a mass of common laborers, a great many intelligent young fellows who have put on flannel shirts and cow-hide boots, have taken pick and shovel and wheelbarrow, not so much for the wages that are paid them as for what they are learning of the art of railroad building. If such men can put up with the treatment ordinarily accorded the section hands of a railway constructing party, they certainly would be satisfied with the manners of officers of the United States army. But--and here is an important distinction--no railway boss, however much of a tyrant he may be, would dare to order one of his hands to cook his supper or wait at his table or groom his horse or do any other service of the quality commonly known as menial, but the American soldier in the regular army is sometimes obliged to regard such demands as a matter of course.