Scharnhorst was the Prussian officer who began to reduce the Napoleonic military system to rules applicable to the use of German armies. Under Bonaparte the whole management of the army was too often concentrated in the hands of the man of genius, and the actual method of Napoleon had the defect that, failing the man of genius at the head of the army, it broke down. The main change made by the Germans, who followed Scharnhorst, in the course of the century has been to codify the Napoleonic system so that it was possible to more generally decentralize in practice without impairing its essence. They have also established a division of its supply department (under a Minister of War) from the “brain of the army,” as Mr. Spenser Wilkinson has well called it, which manages the preparation for the strategy of war and the strategy itself. These so-called Prussian principles of decentralization and “initiative” are, however, not new and not Prussian, and may be discovered in the conversations of Napoleon Bonaparte. The French in 1870 had forgotten his teaching, and the Germans had retained it. It is, nevertheless, the case that the number of men placed in the field by the military powers having increased, the intelligent initiative of corps commanders and even of generals commanding divisions has become the more essential. It is impossible that the great general staff can give orders in advance which will cover the responsibility of all the inferior generals, and brains have to be added in all ranks to obedience. The commander-in-chief in the field cannot with advantage drown himself in details, and he can only provide in his orders an outline sketch which his subordinates in various parts of the field of operations have to fill in. The “initiative of subordinates” is but the natural division of labor. If I, a civilian student of military politics, rather than a military expert, have been called upon to write upon the military progress of the century, it must be because of a desire to bring largely into the account the changes in military organization which on the continent of Europe have made it permanently national, and which in the United States made it temporarily national during the Civil War, and would make it so again in the event of any fresh struggle on a great scale in which the North American continent might become involved.