enlisted man, and to make it far more difficult for
men to act together with effect. At present the fighting must be done in
extended order, which means that each man must act for himself and at
the same time act in combination with others with whom he is no longer
in the old-fashioned elbow-to-elbow touch. Under such conditions a few
men of the highest excellence are worth more than many men without the
special skill which is only found as the result of special training
applied to men of exceptional physique and morale. But nowadays the most
valuable fighting man and the most difficult to perfect is the rifleman
who is also a skillful and daring rider.

The proportion of our cavalry regiments has wisely been increased.
The American cavalryman, trained to manoeuvre and fight with equal
facility on foot and on horseback, is the best type of soldier for
general purposes now to be found in the world. The ideal cavalryman of
the present day is a man who can fight on foot as effectively as the
best infantryman, and who is in addition unsurpassed in the care and
management of his horse and in his ability to fight on horseback.

A general staff should be created. As for the present staff and supply
departments, they should be filled by details from the line, the men
so detailed returning after a while to their line duties. It is very
undesirable to have the senior grades of the Army composed of men who
have come to fill the positions by the mere fact of seniority. A system
should be adopted by which there shall be an elimination grade by grade
of those who seem unfit to render the best service in the next grade.
Justice to the veterans of the Civil War who are still in the Army would
seem to require that in the matter of retirements they be given by law
the same privileges accorded to their comrades in the Navy.

The process of elimination of the least fit should be conducted in a
manner that would render it practically impossible to apply political
or social pressure on behalf of any candidate, so that each man may be
judged purely on his own merits. Pressure for the promotion of civil
officials for political reasons is bad enough, but it is tenfold worse
where applied on behalf of officers of the Army or Navy. Every promotion
and every detail under the War Department must be made solely with
regard to the good of the service and to the capacity and merit of the
man himself. No pressure, political, social, or personal, of a