The discipline, to our English ideas, is very strict.  In the first place no kind of beer, wine, or spirits is allowed at West Point.  The law upon this point may be said to be very vehement, for it debars even the visitors at the hotel from the solace of a glass of beer.  The hotel is within the bounds of the college, and as the lads might become purchasers at the bar, there is no bar allowed.  Any breach of this law leads to instant expulsion; or, I should say rather, any detection of such breach.  The officer who showed us over the college assured me that the presence of a glass of wine in a young man’s room would secure his exclusion, even though there should be no evidence that he had tasted it.  He was very firm as to this; but a little bird of West Point, whose information, though not official or probably accurate in words, seemed to me to be worthy of reliance in general, told me that eyes were wont to wink when such glasses of wine made themselves unnecessarily visible.  Let us fancy an English mess of young men from seventeen to twenty-one, at which a mug of beer would be felony and a glass of wine high treason!  But the whole management of the young with the Americans differs much from that in vogue with us.  We do not require so much at so early an age, either in knowledge, in morals, or even in manliness.  In America, if a lad be under control, as at West Point, he is called upon for an amount of labor and a degree of conduct which would be considered quite transcendental and out of the question in England.  But if he be not under control, if at the age of eighteen he be living at home, or be from his circumstances exempt from professorial power, he is a full-fledged man, with his pipe apparatus and his bar acquaintances.

And then I was told, at West Point, how needful and yet how painful it was that all should be removed who were in any way deficient in credit to the establishment.  “Our rules are very exact,” my informant told me; “but the carrying out of our rules is a task not always very easy.”  As to this also I had already heard something from that little bird of West Point; but of course I wisely assented to my informant, remarking that discipline in such an establishment was essentially necessary.  The little bird had told me that discipline at West Point had been rendered terribly difficult by political interference.  “A young man will be dismissed by the unanimous voice of the board, and will be sent away.  And then, after a week or two, he will be sent back, with an order from Washington that another trial shall be given him.  The lad will march back into the college with all the honors of a victory, and will be conscious of a triumph over the superintendent and his officers.”  “And is that common?” I asked.  “Not at the present moment,” I was told.  “But it was common before the war.  While Mr. Buchanan, and Mr. Pierce, and Mr. Polk were Presidents, no officer or board of officers then at West Point was able to dismiss a lad whose father was a Southerner, and who had friends among the government.”