The rest is the soldier’s own concern.  When cruelly pressed by hardship, the soldiers in Turkey and the Crimea took to drinking; and what they drank was poison.  The vile raid with which they intoxicated themselves carried hundreds to the grave as surely as arsenic would have done.  When, at last, they were well fed, warm, clean, and comfortable, and well amused in the coffee-houses opened for them, there was an end, or a vast diminution, of the evil of drunkenness.  Good coffee and harmless luxuries were sold to them at cost price; and books and magazines and newspapers, chess, draughts, and other games, were at their command.  The American soldiery are a more cultivated set of men than these, and are in proportion more inexcusable for any resort to intemperance.  They ought to have neither the external discomfort nor the internal vacuity which have caused drunkenness in other armies.  The resort to strong drinks so prevalent in the Americans is an ever-lasting mystery to Europeans, who recognize in them a self-governing people, universally educated up to a capacity for intellectual interests such as are elsewhere found to be a safeguard against intemperance in drink.  If the precautions instituted by the authorities are well supported by the volunteers themselves, the most fatal of all perils will be got rid of.  If not, the army will perish by a veritable suicide.  But such a fate cannot be in store for such an army.

There is something else almost as indispensable to the health of soldiers as sobriety, and that is subordination.  The true, magnanimous, patriotic spirit of subordination is not more necessary to military achievement than it is to the personal composure and the trustworthiness of nerve of the individual soldier.  A strong desire and fixed habit of obedience to command relieve a man of all internal conflict between self-will and circumstance, and give him possession of his full powers of action and endurance.  If absolute reliance on authority is a necessity to the great majority of mankind, (which it is,) it is to the few wisest and strongest a keen enjoyment when they can righteously indulge in it; and the occasion on which it is supremely a duty—­in the case of military or naval service—­is one of privilege.  Americans are less accustomed than others to prompt and exact obedience, being a self-governing and unmilitary nation:  and they may require some time to become aware of the privileges of subordination to command.  But time will satisfy them of the truth; and those who learn the lesson most quickly will be the most sensible of the advantage to health of body, through ease of mind.  The abdication of self-will in regard to the ordering of affairs, the repose of reliance upon the responsible parties, the exercise of silent endurance about hardships and fatigues, the self-respect which relishes the honor of cooperation through obedience, the sense of patriotic devotedness which glows through every act of submission to command,—­all