The United States army might as well be one great school of engineering and military tactics. It is well known that the mere company drill, which is almost all the drill the American soldier is ever subjected to, thanks to the distribution of the force in such a way that scarcely any regiment has been together within a single period of enlistment of any soldier in the army, requires very little time. It is no harder to become proficient in than that of the militia of the various States and cities. Indeed, with company drills once a week, almost any militia regiment or company can present a finer appearance upon parade than any but two or three “show” companies of regulars. The remainder of military life consists in guard duty, the details of camp duty and of applied engineering, which each man can learn as rapidly by experience as an equal number of assistants in a construction party anywhere else. It is known well enough at the West that the construction parties of railways contain, beside a mass of common laborers, a great many intelligent young fellows who have put on flannel shirts and cow-hide boots, have taken pick and shovel and wheelbarrow, not so much for the wages that are paid them as for what they are learning of the art of railroad building. If such men can put up with the treatment ordinarily accorded the section hands of a railway constructing party, they certainly would be satisfied with the manners of officers of the United States army.
But--and here is an important distinction--no railway boss, however much of a tyrant he may be, would dare to order one of his hands to cook his supper or wait at his table or groom his horse or do any other service of the quality commonly known as menial, but the American soldier in the regular army is sometimes obliged to regard such demands as a matter of course.
A plan was suggested a short time ago, by a military officer of experience, by which the army might be reorganized on this basis without any additional expense and without any possibility of friction. Several years ago Major Sumner, of the regular army, himself a son of an old regular of national fame, suggested a similar plan regarding a single branch of the service--the cavalry. His plan was to select from among the floating population of wild boys of the different cities a number of the more intelligent, and organize from them a single regiment of cavalry, to be carefully trained and specially educated, the more promising and deserving recruits to be placed in the line of promotion, and all to be encouraged to look to possible rank, responsibility, and position as part of the compensation for the necessary restraint to which they might be subjected. This restraint could by no possibility be more severe and continuous than that of West Point.