the one point of precision of fire.  It is well known that in actual service not more than one shot in six hundred takes effect, and, except for the moral effect of the roar of the musketry and the whistling of the balls, the remaining five hundred and ninety-nine might better have been kept in the cartridge-boxes.  Upon raw troops, for the most part, this moral effect is sufficient to decide the question, with the addition of a comparatively small number of killed and wounded.  But veteran troops are not disturbed by it.  They know that a ball which misses by a quarter of an inch is as harmless as if it had never been shot, and they very soon learn to disregard the whistling.  When they encounter such a fire, however, as the English met at Bunker’s Hill and at New Orleans,—­when the shots which miss are the exceptions, and those which hit, the rule, no amount of discipline or courage can avail.  Disciplined soldiers are no more willing to be shot than raw levies; but having learned by experience that the danger in an ordinary action is very trifling in comparison with its appearance to the imagination of a recruit, they face it with a determination which to him is inconceivable.  Make the apparent danger real, as in the cases we have cited, and veterans become as powerless as the merest tyros.  With the stimulus of the present demand, it is probable that Yankee ingenuity will erelong produce some kind of rifle so far superior to anything yet known as to supersede all others; and indeed we have little doubt that such would already have been the case, but for the fact that comparatively few of our most ingenious mechanics are also expert riflemen, and none but a first-rate shot can thoroughly appreciate all the requirements of the weapon.

Since the Crimean War, the Governments of Europe seem to have become awakened to the fact, that, however important and desirable it may be to secure the best possible implements for the soldier’s use, it is infinitely more so that he should know how to use them.  In the hands of a marksman the rifle is an efficient weapon at half a mile’s distance; but to expect on that account that it will do any more execution in the hands of one who is not familiar with it than a smooth-bored musket is as idle as it would be to hope that a person unacquainted with the violin could give us better music from a Cremona than he could from a corn-stalk fiddle.

For years past the European powers have been training men to the use of the rifle.  Hundreds of thousands of Englishmen and Frenchmen are at this moment as familiar with the practical application of its powers as if their subsistence had been dependent upon its use.  Government and people have perceived that the improvements in small-arms have wrought such a revolution in the art of war as to revive the necessity which existed in the days of archery, of making every man a marksman, and in England the old archery sports of prize-shooting and unremitting private practice