, but a larger interest attaches to the policy of the
two administrations in raising and organising their civilian armies.
The Southern Government, if its proceedings were studied in detail,
would probably seem to have been better advised at the start on matters
of military organisation; for instance, it had early and long retained
a superiority in cavalry which was not a mere result of good fortune.
But here, too, there was an inherent advantage in the very fact that
the South had started upon a desperate venture. There can hardly be a
more difficult problem of detail for statesmen than the co-ordination
of military and civil requirements in the raising of an army. But in
the South all civil considerations merged themselves in the paramount
necessity of a military success for which all knew the utmost effort
was needed. The several States of the South, claiming as they did a
far larger independence than the Northern States, knew that they could
only make that claim good by being efficient members of the
Confederacy. Thus it was comparatively easy for the Confederate
Government to adopt and maintain a consecutive policy in this matter,
and though, from the conditions of a widely spread agricultural
population, voluntary enlistment produced poor results at the beginning
of the war, it appears to have been easy to introduce quite early an
entirely compulsory system of a stringent kind.

The introduction of compulsory service in the North has its place in
our subsequent story. The system that preceded it need not be dwelt
upon here, because, full of instruction as a technical study of it
(such as has been made by Colonel Henderson) must be, no brief survey
by an amateur could be useful. It is necessary, however, to understand
the position in which Lincoln's Administration was placed, without much
experience In America, or perhaps elsewhere in the world, to guide it.
It must not be contended, for it cannot be known that the problem was
fully and duly envisaged by Lincoln on his Cabinet, but it would
probably in any case have been impossible for them to pursue from the
first a consecutive and well-thought-out policy for raising an army and
keeping up its strength. The position of the North differed
fundamentally from that of the South; the North experienced neither the
ardour nor the throes of a revolution; it was never in any fear of
being conquered, only of not conquering. There was nothing, therefore,
which at onc