wn concern. When cruelly pressed by hardship,
the soldiers in Turkey and the Crimea took to drinking; and what they
drank was poison. The vile raid with which they intoxicated themselves
carried hundreds to the grave as surely as arsenic would have done.
When, at last, they were well fed, warm, clean, and comfortable, and
well amused in the coffee-houses opened for them, there was an end, or
a vast diminution, of the evil of drunkenness. Good coffee and harmless
luxuries were sold to them at cost price; and books and magazines and
newspapers, chess, draughts, and other games, were at their command. The
American soldiery are a more cultivated set of men than these, and are
in proportion more inexcusable for any resort to intemperance. They
ought to have neither the external discomfort nor the internal vacuity
which have caused drunkenness in other armies. The resort to strong
drinks so prevalent in the Americans is an ever-lasting mystery to
Europeans, who recognize in them a self-governing people, universally
educated up to a capacity for intellectual interests such as are
elsewhere found to be a safeguard against intemperance in drink. If the
precautions instituted by the authorities are well supported by the
volunteers themselves, the most fatal of all perils will be got rid of.
If not, the army will perish by a veritable suicide. But such a fate
cannot be in store for such an army.

There is something else almost as indispensable to the health of
soldiers as sobriety, and that is subordination. The true, magnanimous,
patriotic spirit of subordination is not more necessary to military
achievement than it is to the personal composure and the trustworthiness
of nerve of the individual soldier. A strong desire and fixed habit of
obedience to command relieve a man of all internal conflict between
self-will and circumstance, and give him possession of his full powers
of action and endurance. If absolute reliance on authority is a
necessity to the great majority of mankind, (which it is,) it is to the
few wisest and strongest a keen enjoyment when they can righteously
indulge in it; and the occasion on which it is supremely a duty--in the
case of military or naval service--is one of privilege. Americans are
less accustomed than others to prompt and exact obedience, being a
self-governing and unmilitary nation: and they may require some time to
become aware of the privileges of subordination to command. But time
will satisfy