CHAPTER IX.
VOLUNTEERS AND REGULARS High quality of first volunteers--Discipline milder than that of the regulars--Reasons for the difference--Practical efficiency of the men--Necessity for sifting the officers--Analysis of their defects--What is military aptitude ?--Diminution of number in ascending scale--Effect of age--Of former life and occupation--Embarrassments of a new business--Quick progress of the right class of young men--Political appointments--Professional men--Political leaders naturally prominent in a civil war--"Cutting and trying"-- Dishonest methods--An excellent army at the end of a year--The regulars in 1861--Entrance examinations for West Point--The curriculum there--Drill and experience--Its limitations--Problems peculiar to the vast increase of the army--Ultra-conservatism--Attitude toward the Lincoln administration--"Point de zele"-- Lack of initiative--Civil work of army engineers--What is military art ?--Opinions of experts--Military history--European armies in the Crimean War--True generalship--Anomaly of a double army organization.
The work of sifting the material for an army which went on through the winter of 1861-62, naturally suggests an analysis of the classes of men who composed both parts of the military force of the nation,--the volunteers and the regulars.

I need add nothing to what I have already said of the unexampled excellence of the rank and file in the regiments raised by the first volunteering.

Later in the war, when "bounty jumping" and substitution for conscripts came into play, the character of the material, especially that recruited in the great cities and seaports, was much lower.

I think, however, that the volunteers were always better men, man for man, than the average of those recruited for the regular army.

The rigidity of discipline did not differ so much between good volunteer regiments and regulars, as the mode of enforcing it.