king of examinations, a comical incident came under my notice
immediately after the War of Secession, when there were still employed
a large number of those volunteer officers who had honorably and
usefully filled up the depleted ranks of the regular service--an
accession of strength imperatively needed. There were among them,
naturally, inefficients as well as efficients. One had applied for
promotion, and a board of three, among them myself, was assembled to
examine. Several commonplace questions in seamanship were put to him,
of which I now remember only that he had no conception of the
difference between a ship moored, and one lying at single anchor--a
subject as pertinent to-day as a hundred years ago. After failing to
explain this, he expressed his wish not to go further; whereupon one
of the board asked why, if ignorant of these simple matters, he had
applied for examination. His answer was, "I did not apply for
examination, I applied for promotion." Even in this case, when the
applicant had left the room, the president of the board, then a
somewhat notorious survival of the unfittest, long since departed this
life, asked whether we refused to pass him. The third member, himself
a volunteer officer, and myself, said we did. "Well," he rejoined,
"you know this man may get a chance at _you_ some day." This prudent
consideration, however, did not save him.

Such tolerance towards the unfit, the reluctance to strike the
individual in the interests of the community, was but a special, and
not very flagrant, instance of the sympathy evoked for much worse
offenders--murderers, and defrauders--in civil life. In such cases,
the average man, except when personally affected, sides unreasonably
with the sufferer and against the public; witness the easily signed
petitions for pardon which flow in. It can be understood that in a
public employment, civil or military, there will usually be reluctance
to punish, and especially to take the bread out of the mouths of a man
and his family by ejection. Usually only immediate personal interest
in efficiency can supply the needed hardness of heart. Speaking after
a very extensive and varied inside experience of courts-martial, I can
say most positively that their tendency is not towards the excessive
severity which I have heard charged against them by an eminent
lawyer. On the contrary, the difficulty is to keep the members up to
the mark against their natural and professional sympathi