s
to see the reason why a second lieutenant should have four or five times
the pay of an orderly sergeant, and be officially recognized all through
the army regulations as a gentleman, while he who holds the much more
arduous and responsible office is simply an 'enlisted man,' It will be
much easier for him to discover why this is so than to find any good
reason why it should remain so. We are managing an army of half a
million by the routine intended for one of ten thousand, and we are
organizing citizen volunteers under regulations first created for the
most dissimilar army to be found in the civilized world. We adopted our
army system from England, where there are widely and perpetually
distinct classes of society in peace as well as war; the nobility and
gentry furnishing all the officers, while the ranks are filled up with
the vast crowd, poor and ignorant enough to fight for sixpence a day. To
our little standing army of bygone days the system was well enough
adapted, for in that we too had really two distinct classes of men. West
Point furnished even more officers than we needed, with thorough
education, and the refined and expensive habits that education brings
with it. The ranks were filled with foreigners and broken-down men, who
had neither the ambition nor the ability to rise to anything higher. But
we have changed all that. The healthiest and best blood of our country
is flowing in that country's cause. Our army is composed of more than
half a million citizens, young, eager, ambitious, and trained from
infancy each to believe himself the equal of any man on earth. With the
privates under their command the officers have for the most part been
playmates, schoolmates, associates in business, all through life. A
trifle more of experience or of energy, or the merest accident sometimes
has made one captain, while the other has gone into the ranks; but
unless those men were created over again, you could not make between
them the difference that the army regulations contemplate. Once off
duty, there is nothing left to found it on.

'I say, Jack,' said an officer at Pittsburg Landing to an old crony who
was serving as private in another company, 'where did you get that
turkey?'

'Well, cap, I want to know first whether you ask that question as an
officer or as a friend.'

'As a friend, of course, Jack.'

'Then it's none of your d---- business, Tom!'

The difference in pay is not only too great, but is made up