still before him, firmly established on Virginian soil; hope of foreign intervention, despite the assurances of the politicians, was gradually fading, and it was but too evident that the war was far from over.  Yet at no time during their two years of service had the soldiers shown the slightest sign of that discouragement which seized the Germans after two months.  And who shall dare to say that the Southerner was less highly civilised than the Prussian or the Bavarian?  Political liberty, freedom of speech and action, are the real elements of civilisation, and not merely education.  But let the difference in the constitution of the two armies be borne in mind.  The Confederates, with few exceptions, were volunteers, who had become soldiers of their own choice, who had assumed arms deliberately and without compulsion, and who by their own votes were responsible that war had been declared.  The Germans were conscripts, a dumb, powerless, irresponsible multitude, animated, no doubt, by hereditary hatred of the enemy, but without that sense of moral obligation which exists in the volunteer.  We may be permitted, then, to believe that this sense of moral obligation was one reason why the spirit of the Southerners rose superior to human weakness, and that the old adage, which declares that one volunteer is better than three pressed men, is not yet out of date.  Nor is it an unfair inference that the armies of the Confederacy, allied by the “crimson thread of kinship” to those of Wellington, of Raglan, and of Clyde, owed much of their enduring fortitude to “the rock whence they were hewn.”

And yet, with all their admirable qualities, the Southern soldiers had not yet got rid of their original defects.  Temperate, obedient, and well-conducted, small as was the percentage of bad characters and habitual misdoers, their discipline was still capable of improvement.  The assertion, at first sight, seems a contradiction in terms.  How could troops, it may be asked, who so seldom infringed the regulations be other than well-disciplined?  For the simple reason that discipline in quarters is an absolutely different quality from discipline in battle.  No large body of intelligent men, assembled in a just cause and of good character, is likely to break out into excesses, or, if obedience is manifestly necessary, to rebel against authority.  Subordination to the law is the distinguishing mark of all civilised society.  But such subordination, however praiseworthy, is not the discipline of the soldier, though it is often confounded with it.  A regiment of volunteers, billeted in some country town, would probably show a smaller list of misdemeanours than a regiment of regulars.  Yet the latter might be exceedingly well-disciplined, and the former have no real discipline whatever.  Self-respect—­for that is the discipline of the volunteer—­is not battle discipline, the discipline of the cloth, of habit, of tradition, of constant association and of mutual confidence.  Self-respect, excellent in itself, and by no means unknown amongst regular soldiers, does not carry with it a mechanical obedience to command, nor does it merge the individual in the mass, and give the tremendous power of unity to the efforts of large numbers.