d what was the sacrifice of which
a soldier speaks so pathetically? To be raised from the management of a
railway to one of the most conspicuous and inspiring positions of
modern times, to an opportunity such as comes rarely to any man, and
then only as the reward of transcendent ability transcendently
displayed! To step from a captaincy of engineers to the command in
chief of a great nation on fire with angry enthusiasm, spendthrift of
men, money, devotion, to be the chosen champion of order, freedom, and
civilization,--this is indeed a sacrifice such as few men have been
called upon to make by their native land! And of what is General
McClellan thinking when he talks of returning to obscurity? Of what are
men commonly thinking when they talk thus? The newspapers would soon
grow rich, if everybody should take to advertising what he did not
want. And, moreover, to what kind of obscurity can a successful general
return? An obscurity made up of the gratitude and admiration of his
countrymen, a strange obscurity of glory! Nor is this the only occasion
on which the General speaks of his willingness to share the fate of his
army. What corporal could do less? No man thoroughly in earnest, and
with the fate of his country in his hands and no thought but of that,
could have any place in his mind for such footlight phrases as these.

General McClellan's theory from the first seems to have been that a
large army would make a great general, though all history shows that
the genius, decision, and confidence of a leader are the most powerful
reinforcement of the troops under his command, and that an able captain
makes a small army powerful by recruiting it with his own vigor and
enthusiasm. From the time of his taking the command till his removal,
he was constantly asking for more men, constantly receiving them, and
constantly unable to begin anything with them after he got them. He
could not move without one hundred and fifty thousand pairs of legs,
and when his force had long reached that number, the President was
obliged by the overtaxed impatience of the country to pry him up from
his encampment on the Potomac with a special order. What the army
really needed was an addition of one man, and that at the head of it;
for a general, like an orator, must be moved himself before he can move
others. The larger his army, the more helpless was General McClellan.
Like the magician's _famulus_, who rashly undertook to play the
part of mast