But if the American soldier seems only recently to have come to his own in the appreciation of Europe, he has long been the same soldier that he is to-day. To be sure, training and discipline have improved him as a product; our officers have made the study of the soldier a science, and each year has marked a finer adaptation of methods to ends; Yankee ingenuity has had fewer traditional prejudices to overcome than have prevailed abroad, and in the relations of officers and men, in the development of each unit’s individuality as a self-reliant intelligence, the later years have been a period of surprising evolution. But, on the other hand, the American soldier’s native quality is the same as in that Civil War which required four years of more terrible slaughter than Europe ever knew before one side would yield to the other. If we were always confident of him, our boasts were founded on an experience of his fibre which Europe had not apprehended. His valor, his quiet contempt of death, could not, in its most extreme exhibition, surprise his own countrymen. The only thing that robbed the gallant Hobson and his comrades of the highest distinction was that several thousand others on the fleet were sick with disappointment that they could not go in their place.
Nevertheless, the appreciation of Europe is agreeable, if belated.
The soldier of the Queen did not need a new opportunity to prove his quality. From the time that Cromwell’s Ironsides made the chivalry of the Continent to skip, Europe and America have had a steadfast respect for the redoubtability of the British warrior. Moreover, he has been a civilizing power throughout the world; wherever he has cleared a path, commerce has followed. It has not always seemed like Christian justice to hew a way for trade with a sword, or to subject an unwilling people to a rule of might under which they chafe and fret; but there is always one word of praise which can truthfully be said--the government that reaches from London to the remotest quarters of the globe has made the world better, happier, and securer, even through its conquests over unwilling peoples. Redcoat and khaki have stood for order, and, in the main and in the long run, for the largest justice to the largest number.