ur this week, alluded to in your telegram to-day, may be such
as to justify you in taking the course universally desired by the
army. We want our general where he can best look after all the
interests of the military service, with power to command the army
in fact as well as in name.

"I have read with the greatest pleasure your capital speech to the
Knights of St. Patrick.

"Please present my respectful compliments to the Secretary of War,
and my kindest regards to the President.

"I am, dear General, as ever, truly yours,
"J. M. Schofield."

During the Civil War the demand for the services in the field of
the most capable officers had, as was generally understood, been
prejudicial to the interests of the military academy; and this
continued some time after the close of the war, in consequence of
the unusual increase in rank of those officers who were known to
be fitted in all respects for the head of that institution. This
difficulty was increased by the very unreasonable notion that
because the law had opened the academy to the line of the army,
the superintendent must necessarily be taken from the line, and
not from the corps of engineers, although the latter contained many
officers of appropriate rank who had then added to their high
scientific ability and attainments distinguished services in the
field. Even in the line, officers were not wanting of appropriate
rank, character, ability, education, and experience to qualify them
for the duties of superintendent. For example, my immediate
predecessor, Major-General Thomas H. Ruger, then a colonel of
infantry, was in all respects highly qualified for that office;
and when I relived him I found the academy in about the same state
of efficiency which had characterized it before the war. There
was, in fact, at that time little, if any, foundation for the
assumption that the interests of the military academy required the
assignment of any officer of higher rank than colonel to duty as
superintendent of the academy. Of course I did not know this before
I went there, and it was a matter for the judgment of my superiors,
whose duty, and not mine, it was to know the facts.

ULTERIOR REASONS FOR THE APPOINTMENT

But General Sherman had other reasons, some of them very cogent in
his own estimation at least, for desiring my presence somewhere in
the Eastern States; and the West Point "detail" was the only way
in which th