the general public, or to make them pleasing and
attractive to it. However it may be with other specialties, the
utility of which is more willingly admitted, the navy and army in our
country cannot afford to take such an attitude. The brilliant, but
vague, excitement and glory of war, in its more stirring phases,
touches readily the popular imagination, as does intense action of
every description. It has all the charm of the dramatic, heightened by
the splendor of the heroic. But where there is no appeal beyond the
imagination to the intellect, such impressions lack distinctness, and
leave no really useful results. While there is a certain exaltation in
sharing, through vivid narrative, the emotions of those who have borne
a part in some deed of conspicuous daring, the fascination does not
equal that wrought upon the intellect, as it traces for the first time
the long-drawn sequence by which successive occurrences are seen to
issue in their necessary results, or causes apparently remote to
converge upon a common end, and understanding succeeds to the previous
sense of bewilderment, which is produced by military events as too
commonly treated.

There is, moreover, no science--or art--which lends itself to such
exposition more readily than does the Art of War. Its principles are
clear, and not numerous. Outlines of operations, presented in
skeleton, as they usually may be, are in most instances surprisingly
clear; and, these once grasped, the details fall into place with a
readiness and a precision that convey an ever increasing intellectual
enjoyment. The writer has more than once been witness of the pleasure
thus occasioned to men wholly strangers to military matters; a
pleasure partly of novelty, but which possesses the elements of
endurance because the stimulus is one that renews itself continually,
opening field after field for the exercise of the mind.

If such pleasure were the sole result, however, there might be
well-founded diffidence in recommending the study. The advantage
conferred upon the nation by a more wide-spread and intelligent
understanding of military matters, as a factor in national life that
must exist for some ages to come, and one which recent events, so far
from lessening, have rendered more conspicuous and more necessary,
affords a sounder ground for insisting that it is an obligation of
each citizen to understand something of the principles of warfare, and
of the national needs in respect of