of the European warrior; for it was not until the Germans had been warned by the terrific losses incurred in their earlier battles with the French, in 1870, that they evolved from their own experience a system of tactics, the essential principles of which had already been demonstrated on the Western Continent. The increased range of artillery again received a practical illustration; for at the siege of Fort Pulaski the Union batteries first opened fire at ranges varying from 1650 to 3400 yards from the Confederate fort. At the siege of Charleston shells were thrown into the city from a battery nearly five miles distant. In 1866, the brief but bloody war between Austria and Prussia suddenly raised the latter nation from a comparatively subordinate position to the front rank of military powers. The greatness of Prussia was born in the sackcloth and ashes of national humiliation. Forbidden by Napoleon, after her crushing defeat in 1806–7, to maintain an army of more than 40,000 men, her great war minister, Scharnhorst, conceived the plan of discharging the soldiers from military service as soon as they had received the requisite instruction, and filling their places with recruits. In this way, though the standing army never exceeded the stipulated number, many thousands of Prussians received military training; and when Prussia declared war against Napoleon, after his disastrous Russian campaign, the discharged men were called back into the ranks, and there arose as if by magic a formidable Prussian army of trained soldiers. The principle of universal military service, thus called into existence in Prussia in time of war, had been continued through fifty years of peace, and enabled Prussia, with a population scarcely more than half as numerous as that of Austria, to place upon the decisive field of Königgrätz a larger army than that of her opponent.