This same difference was visible in the _personnel_ of our own and the rebel armies, and it resulted from the same cause, and that cause was education. The Union army was superior in prowess to that of the South because superior in discipline, and it was superior in discipline because superior in education. The Union army was recruited from a people confirmed in habits of industry, and inured to hard and severe manual and mental labor. That of the rebels was recruited from among men reared in the comparative idleness of agricultural life, and not habituated to severe toil, or conscripted from that hardier class of "poor whites" whose spirits had been broken by long existence in a state of ignorance and of slavery not less abject because indirectly enforced and unsuspectedly endured. Neither fraction of the rebel army, as a class, was the equal either in refinement, education, or habits of the men of the North, nor were both combined in an army organization equal in discipline, or the courage and effectiveness which results from it, to that which sprang to the nation's aid in 1861. Although the camp morality of both armies might have been better, there can be no doubt in any unprejudiced mind that the moral sentiment of the soldiers of the North was much more refined and correct than that of the organized forces of the South. Not only was their discipline better, not only were they under superior control in battle and in camp, but when, at times, relieved of the restrictions which are thrown around camps, their thoughts naturally turned less to dissipation and excesses than those of the Southern soldiers. The military despotism at the South was much more severely enforced by the rebel armies than it was by our own, though looked upon as that of an enemy. The excesses which at times existed in both armies were of Southern parentage. Sherman's "bummers" were legitimate descendants of Morgan's raiders and Stuart's cavalry, and at no time during the period in which they were "let loose" in Georgia and South Carolina could they excel Wheeler's cavalry in the art of plundering and destroying. The destruction of Atlanta and Columbia by our army under Sherman occurred nearly two years after the burning of Chambersburg by the rebels under Ewell.