abuses of exemption and detail, so often and so clearly pointed out,
were looked into and measurably corrected.

Further than this, all boys from 16 to 18, and older men, from 45 to
60, though not conscribed, were formed into reserve "home guards;" and
then General Grant wrote to Washington that the cause was won when the
Rebels "robbed the cradle and the grave."

But the infantile and the moribund murmured not; and more than once a
raid was turned and a sharp skirmish won, when the withered cheek of
the octogenarian was next the rosy face of the beardless stripling!

Only one complaint came, and that was heard with grim amusement alike
by veteran, by conscript, and by substitute.

The substitute buyers now loudly raised a wail of anguish. Plethoric
ledger and overflowing till, alas! must be left; the auctioneer's
hammer and the peaceful shears must alike be thrown aside, and the
rusty musket grasped instead; soft beds and sweet dreams of to-morrow's
profit must be replaced by red mud and the midnight long roll!

It was very bitter; and rising in their wrath, a few of these railed at
the perfidy of the Government in breaking a contract; and even employed
counsel to prove that in effect they were already in the field.

One ardent speculator even sought the War Department and logically
proved that, having sent a substitute, who was virtually himself, and
that substitute having been killed, he himself was a dead man, from
whom the law could claim no service!

But the Department was now as deaf as the adder of Scripture; and the
counsel, let us hope, pleaded not very earnestly. So the substitute
buyers--except in the few cases where the long finger of influential
patronage could even now intervene--went, as their ill-gotten dollars
had gone before.

It is plainly impossible, in limits of a desultory sketch, to give even
a faint outline of the conscription. Its ramifications were so
great--the stress that caused it so dire, and the weaknesses and abuses
that grew out of it so numerous, that a history of them were but a
history of the war.

Faithfully and stringently carried out, it might have saved the South.
Loosely constructed and open to abuse, it was still the most potent
engine the Government had used; and while it failed of its intent, it
still for the first time caused the invader to be met by anything
approaching the whole strength of the country.

Under its later workings, every man in the South was a sol