experiences in camp and battle.  He was a man of fine tastes and well accomplished both in science and literature with a substratum of manly tenacity and good sense, who did noble duty on many a field and produced, in his Military Reminiscences one of our most satisfactory books on the Civil War period.  The manner of the veteran was simple and pleasant.  Nothing betrayed that he had been the hero in such an eventful past.  I have of course no thought of sketching his career or criticising his account of it.  As to the point to which I have referred, his claim that a peaceful American can be turned into a soldier off-hand and that the West Pointers no more made good in the war than did the civilians, he sets forth the case calmly.  He takes the curriculum at West Point as it was sixty years ago and plainly shows that as regards acquirements in general it bears a poor comparison with that of civilian universities and colleges of that period.  As to especial military education, he claims that the instruction at West Point was comparatively trifling; the cadets were well drilled only in the elements, while as regards the larger matters of strategy and the management of armies there was slight opportunity to learn.  The cadet came out qualified to drill a company or at most a regiment, while as to manoeuvring of divisions and corps he had no chance to perfect himself.  The cadet, moreover, had this handicap—­he had been made the slave of routine and his natural enterprise had been so far repressed that he magnified petty details and precedents and was slow to adapt himself to an unlooked-for emergency.  He cites an example where he himself was set to fight a battle by a West Point superior with old-fashioned muzzle-loading guns, the improved arms which were at hand and which might easily have been used with good effect remaining in the rear.  His conclusion is that a wide-awake American trained in the hustle of daily life, with a good basis of common sense and some capacity for adaptation, could, with a few month’s experience, undertake to good advantage the direction of soldiers, and that the West Point preceding 1861 had an influence rather nugatory in bringing about success.  It is perhaps sufficient answer to arguments of this kind that while during our Civil War there was a most relentless sifting of men for high positions, little regard being paid to the education and antecedents of those submitted to it, the men who finally emerged at the front were almost exclusively West Pointers.  Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and Thomas, the Union champions par excellence, were West Pointers.  Lee, Stonewall Jackson, the Johnstons, and Longstreet are no less conspicuous among the Confederates.  Civilians for the most part were not found in the high places, or if they were so placed the results were unfortunate, as in the cases of Butler, Banks, and McClernand.  There were of course good soldiers who came from civil life.  Cox himself is a conspicuous instance,