supreme
over college and universities.

Lincoln was such a man in speech, in power of argument, in practical
wisdom, by which he was enabled to act fearlessly and with success in
the great affairs of administration.

Such a man was General Grant on the military side of his career. With
great military capacity, he was destitute of the military spirit.
During the period of his retirement from the army after the close of
the Mexican War he gave no attention to military affairs. When he came
to Washington in 1865 as General of the Army, he was not the owner of a
work on war nor on the military art or science.

His military capacity was an endowment. It might have been impaired or
crippled by the training of a university; but it is doubtful whether it
could have been improved thereby, and it is certain that it was, in
its quality, quite outside of the possibilities of university training.

As General Grant approached the end of his career the voice of the
critics, who judged men by the testimony of college catalogues and the
decorations of learned societies, was heard less frequently; and his
death, followed by the publication of his memoirs, written when the
hand of death was upon him, silenced the literary critics at once and
forever.

Since the month of July, 1885, there has appeared on the other side of
the Atlantic a set of military critics, of whom General Wolseley,
Commander of the British Army, must be treated as the chief, who deny
to General Grant the possession of superior military qualities, and who
assert that General Lee was his superior in the contest which they
carried on from February, 1864, to April, 1865. On this side of the
Atlantic there is toleration, if not active and open support of General
Wolseley's opinion.

General Wolseley is entitled to an opinion and to the expression of his
opinion; but his authority cannot be admitted. On the practical side
of military affairs his experience is a limited experience only.

It is not known that General Wolseley ever, in any capacity, engaged in
any battle that can be named in comparison with the battles of the
Wilderness, with Spottsylvania, with Cold Harbor, or the battle of Five
Forks; and it is certain that it was never his fortune to put one
hundred thousand men, or even fifty thousand men, into the wage of
battle and thus assume the responsibility of the contest.

It was never the necessity of the situation that General Lee should
assume th