In our popular praises of the wonders performed by the great armies of citizens which sprang up in a few days, let it never be forgotten that the regular army, with its discipline, was the “little leaven” which spread its martial virtues through the entire forces; that the West Point soldier was the man whose skill organized these grand armies, and made it possible for them to gain their victories. [Illustration: GENERAL GEORGE H. THOMAS.] Honor to the volunteer soldier! He is history’s greatest hero. What kind of apprenticeship for war has _he_ served? To learn this, let us go back to the peaceful time of 1860, when the grim-visaged monster’s “wrinkled front” was yet smooth. Now, look through the great ironworking district of Pennsylvania, with its miles of red-mouthed furnaces, its thousand kinds of manufactures, and its ten thousands of skilled workmen. Number the civil engineers; count the miners; go into the various places where crude metals and other materials are worked up into every shape known, to meet the necessities of the modern arts. These are the sources of military power. Here are the men who will build bridges, and equip railroads for army transportation, almost in the twinkling of an eye. Cast your mind’s eye back into all the corners of the land, obscure or conspicuous, and in every place you shall see soldiers being trained. They are not yet in line, and it does not look like a military array; the farmer at his plow, the scholar and the professional man at the desk, are all getting ready to be soldiers. No nation is better prepared for war than one which has been at peace; for war is a consumer of arts, of life, of physical resources. And we had a reserve of those very things accumulating, as we still have all the time. Europe, with its standing armies, stores gunpowder in guarded magazines. America has the secret of gunpowder, and uses the saltpeter and other elements for civil purposes; believing that there is more explosive power in knowing how to make an ounce of powder than there is in the actual ownership of a thousand tons of the very stuff itself. The Federal army had not gone through years of discipline in camp, but it was no motley crowd. Its units were not machines; they were better than machines; they were men. James A. Garfield became a volunteer, a citizen soldier. The manner of his going into the army was as strikingly characteristic of him as any act of his life. In a letter written from Cleveland, on June 14, 1861, to his life-long friend, B. A. Hinsdale, he said: “The Lieutenant-Colonelcy of the Twenty-fourth Regiment has been tendered to me, and the Governor urges me to accept. I am greatly perplexed on the question of duty. I shall decide by Monday next.”