I cannot, as a civilian, assume to give a judgment which shall be accepted by any one, upon the relative standing of military men; but I cannot accept, without question, the decision of a military man who never won a great victory in a great battle, upon a chieftain who fought many great battles and never lost one. I end my observations upon General Grant as a soldier by the relation of an incident in my acquaintance with General Sherman, which was intimate during the four years that I was at the head of the Treasury Department. It was my custom in those years to spend evenings at General Sherman's, where we indulged ourselves in conversation and in the enjoyment of the game of billiards. Our conversations were chiefly upon the war. In those conversations General Grant's name and doings were the topics often. General Sherman never instituted a comparison between General Grant and any one else, nor did he ever express an opinion of General Grant as a military leader; but his conversation always assumed that General Grant was superior to every other officer, himself, General Sherman, included. In concurrence with the opinion of General Sherman the friends of General Grant may call an array of witnesses who, both from numbers and character, are entitled to large confidence. During the four years of the Civil War more than two million men served in the Northern Army. Many of them, more than a majority of them, probably, served for at least three years each. With an unanimity that was never disturbed by an audible voice of dissent, the two million veterans gave to General Grant supremacy over all the other officers under whom they had served. With like unanimity the chief officers of the army assigned the first place to General Grant, and never in any other war of modern times has there been equal opportunity for the applications of a satisfactory test to leaders. In all the wars which England has been engaged since the fall of Napoleon, except, possibly, the Crimean War, the opposing forces have been composed of inferior races of men. The fields of contest have been in India, Egypt and South Africa. From such contests no satisfactory opinion can be formed as to the qualities of the leaders of the victorious forces. In our Civil War the men and the officers were of the same race in the main, and the educated officers had been alike trained at West Point. Except in numbers, the armies of the North and the South were upon an equality, and in all the great contests, the numbers engaged were equal substantially. The quality of the man and officers may be gauged and measured with accuracy from the fact that at Shiloh, in the Wilderness and at Gettysburg the same fields were contested for two and three continuous days. It has been said of Mr. Adams that when an English sympathizer with the South lauded the bravery of the Southern Army, Mr. Adams replied: "Yes, they are brave men; they are my country- men."