or drunk, it ought to make the finest
scientific and survey corps that the world has ever seen. It does
excellent work now, but there is this defect in its nature: it is
officered, as you know, from West Point, but the mischief of it is that
West Point seems to be created for the purpose of spreading a general
knowledge of military matters among the people. A boy goes up to that
institution, gets his pass, and returns to civil life, so they tell me,
with a dangerous knowledge that he is a sucking Moltke, and may apply
his learning when occasion offers. Given trouble, that man will be a
nuisance, because he is a hideously versatile American to begin with,
as cocksure of himself as a man can be, and with all the racial
disregard for human life to back him through his demi-semi-professional
generalship. In a country where, as the records of the daily papers
show, men engaged in a conflict with police or jails are all too ready
to adopt a military formation, and get heavily shot in a sort of cheap,
half-instructed warfare instead of being decently scared by the
appearance of the military, this sort of arrangement does not seem wise.
The bond between the States is of amazing tenuity. So long as they do
not absolutely march into the District of Columbia, sit on the
Washington statues, and invent a flag of their own, they can legislate,
lynch, hunt negroes through swamps, divorce, railroad, and rampage as
much as ever they choose. They do not need knowledge of their own
military strength to back their genial lawlessness. That Regular Army,
which is a dear little army, should be kept to itself, blooded on
detachment duty, turned into the paths of science, and now and again
assembled at feasts of Freemasons and so forth. It's too tiny to be a
political power. The immortal wreck of the Grand Army of the Republic is
a political power of the largest and most unblushing description. It
ought not to help to lay the foundations of an amateur military power
that is blind and irresponsible....

Be thankful that the balance of this lecture is suppressed, and with it
the account of a "shiveree" which I attended in Livingstone City: and
the story of the editor and the sub-editor (the latter was a pet cougar,
or mountain lion, who used, they said, skilfully to sub-edit disputants
in the office) of the Livingstone daily paper.

Omitting a thousand matters of first importance, let me pick up the
thread of things on a narrow-gauge line that t