It can have no possible feature in common with war in its sure enough form and fashion. Sham war goes by certain fixed rules arranged over a map at night to be carried out in the morning. This brigade is to do so and so, as will this division, as will this corps. The attack is planned as would be a pleasure trip, the defense also. Nothing is left to skill, to superior generalship, to the sudden massing of strong columns upon weak ones, to the swift concentration of a more powerful artillery; while last, but by no means least, nothing is left to that intangible yet all powerful thing called by the ancients fate and by the moderns fortune. Charles V. perfectly understood it when the great Conde baffled him at Metz: "I am too old," he said. "Fortune needs to be wooed by younger lovers."

On the other hand, actual war calls every resource of the commander into instant action, and demands that he shall be capable on the moment to seize upon and make favorable every circumstance as it arises. It is imperatively necessary that the army which attacks shall be governed largely by the movements of the army which resists. A plan of battle is all well enough, but it must be a plan that will stretch for leagues, contract for leagues, change its entire sum and substance or be of such a nature as to be abandoned altogether when it is no longer fit to be relied upon in the face of its surroundings. In other words, it is one thing to plan and another thing to execute. Actual war gives scope to all that is daring, wary, crafty, impassive and omniscient in man; mimic war puts him on an easy-going horse, and bids him ride leisurely down a certain road and halt at a certain stopping place for the night. Actual war means to get there first with the most men, and then go for everything in sight; mimic war means that if so and so happens, then so and so must be done. Here are your metes and bounds. Those whom you have to encounter have also their metes and bounds. On each side they are inexorable. Do what you are told and attend to your own business.

Therefore we ask again, Do these mimic manœuvrers ever amount to anything? "I never manœuvrer," said Grant. "Wherever I find General Lee I shall attack him." All of which did not prevent him from grinding to powder by sheer attrition. "The company is the unit," said Napoleon. "It is my captains who have won all my victories. Drill for me your companies perfectly and I will do all the balance." The Roman legions gave all their spare time to rigid drill and discipline. Marlborough made his soldiers well nigh invincible by launching them against the enemy. The suggestion merely of a mimic manœuvrer to old Frederick the Great would have brought a blow from his walking stick. Wellington in all his life never perhaps dreamed of one. Hannibal rested when he did not fight. Alexander feasted when he was not marching.

Who knows, however, but what the times have changed greatly? It may be that the German Emperor knows his business much better than any one else can in the American republic, whose standing army could be comfortably camped in a twenty-acre field. Any way Berlin is safe, and that is something to be thankful for.

WILL-O'-THE-WISP.

[Kansas City Times, September 22, 1888.]

There has been published for some time, in newspapers as well as in magazines, a wonderful story of a hidden treasure, said to have been buried by an Indian when Pizarro conquered Peru. Accord

ing to reports, which break forth every now and then as though the subject were a new one, many a hunt has been made for it and many a hunter has given up the search, baffled and disappointed.

And no wonder, if they take the following as a lamp for their feet and a light for their eyes. It is from the American Magazine, and it reads:

"Everyone who has read Prescott's fascinating volumes knows what followed. With the aid of the Spaniards, Atahualpa conquered his brother. When he lay a prisoner in the hands of the guests he had treated so hospitably, he offered to fill his prison with gold if they would release him. They agreed, and his willing subjects brought the treasure, but the greedy Spaniards demanded more. Runners were hurried all over the country, and the simple, unselfish people surrendered all their wealth to save their king. But Pizarro became tired of waiting for the treasure, and the men in charge of it, upon hearing the news that Atahualpa had been strangled, buried the gold and silver in the L'anganati, where the Spaniards have been searching for it ever since."

"Everybody who has read Prescott's fascinating volumes knows no such thing. Atahualpa never saw a Spaniard, and most probably never heard of one, until seven months, and most likely two years, after he had whipped his brother in two pitched battles, seized upon his capital and dispossessed bim of his territory. It was the old story of a divided inheritance. Huayna Capac, by far the greatest Inca of all of a long line of Peruvian Incas, divided his kingdom, at his death, between his two sons, Huascar and Atahualpa. The first was mild, generous, lovable, merciful and just; the last was fierce, intractable and savage. He rose upon Huascar, conquered him, and dethroned him. Then came Pizarro, who lured Atahualpa into the city of Caxamalca. He came accompanied by an armed following of some six thousand. These were butchered to a man and the person of the Inca himself seized upon and held in close confinement. The declaration that he offered Pizarro as a ransom his prison full of gold is simply laughable. It was only one apartment which Atahualpa promised to fill, and this was seventeen feet broad by twenty-two feet long. The height was indicated by a line drawn nine feet from the floor. Nothing was to be melted down. The gold was to retain the original form of the articles into which it had first been manufactured.

The line had not been anywhere even nearly reached-and it is quite probable that it could never have been reached-when the Spanish soldiers began to clamor furiously for a division. Pizarro either could not or would not gainsay them. He ordered some very skillful goldsmith to reduce everything to ingots, or bars of a uniform standard, which were afterward nicely weighed under the superintenderce of the royal inspectors. The total amount of gold was found to be about $15,500,000 of our money. One fifth of this was sent to the then emperor of Spain, Charles V., which he duly received and duly made returns for in the shape of very valuable land grants and most extraordinary privileges bestowed upon the conquerors. The balance of this gigantic amount of ransom money was next distributed, at a ratio fully agreed upon, among Pizarro's officers and men. Not a word is said anywhere about a single gold bar being buried by Indian or what rot. The word L'langanati is never written on a single page of Prescott's history which deals with this dark, this thrilling, this almost miraculous episode in Peruvian conquest, the conquest itself being the greatest miracle of them all.

The final manner of the killing of Atahualpa has never been satisfactorily explained. Whether he was strangled, garroted, or burnt, is yet an open question for debate. He certainly lost his life. He had murdered his own brother, his rightful sovereign, and to the third generation he had destroyed every relation who was supposed to contain a drop of the blood of the mighty Inca, Huayna Capac. The surroundings of Pizarro were desperate. At the best he never had over 700 Spanish soldiers all told, and he was in the midst of a hostile population of seven or eight millions. It seems incredible, but it is true. Worse circumstanced, and more fearfully beset, his kinsman and townsman, Cortez, did the same with Gautemozin, the last Aztec monarch of Mexico.

The silly paragraph from the magazine above quoted would never have been referred to at all had it not been accompanied by the declaration that a company in New York was being formed for the purpose of hunting for the buried treasures of Atahualpa which, if buried at all, were buried nearly 350 years ago. Should it be formed and should any of its prospectors go pestering about the site of the ancient Caxamalca, the Peruvians themselves would laugh them out of South America.

By the way, this buried treasure business is no new will-o'-thewisp no new Jack-with-his-lantern. They are still hunting for the gold the pirate Kidd hid somewhere out of sight. Acre after acre bas been dug over or plowed over to find the treasures of Lafitte, although Lafitte had been amnestied long before he died peacefully in his bed, and had no need to bury any treasures. There are three islands in the Pacific Ocean, off the Mexican port of Tepic, called "The Three Marys," which have been regularly explored for half a century by hunters hunting for the gold that that cruel buccaneer Morgan must surely have buried somewhere on one of the three, according to tradition. But after all, perhaps, it is just as well as not to let these sort of cranks complacently alone. They are perfectly harmless and their credulity is one of the few imbecile phases of human nature which amuses the multitude.

WOLESLEY ON M'CLELLAN AND LEE.

[Kansas City Times, September 30, 1898.]

"And lastly, let me glance at General Lee. Lee's strategy when he fought in defense of the Southern capital, and threatened and finally struck at that of the United States, marks him as one of the greatest captains of this or any other age. No man has ever fought an uphill and a losing game with greater firmness, or ever displayed a higher order of true military genius than he did when in command of the Confederate Army. The knowledge of his profession displayed by General McClellan was considerable, and his strategic conceptions were admirable, but he lacked one attribute of a general, without which no man can ever succeed in war-he was never able to estimate with any accuracy the numbers opposed to him. It was the presence in Lee of that intuitive genius for war which McClellan lacked, which again and again gave him victory, even when he was altogether outmatched in numbers."-Lord Wolesley in Fortnightly Review.

Why single out McClellan for these kind of comparisons? Why make him alone, of all the Federal commanders, the one sole standard by which shall be tried the military successes and abilities of Lee? Lord Wolseley has not alone done this, although he has

done it often; but the Count of Paris, also, Colonel Chesney, Colonel Freemantle, Count Von Borcke and a multitude of American writers good, bad and indiflerent. Why not occasionally range up alongside of him McDowell or Burnside or Hooker or Halleck or Pope or Mead or Grant? He fought all of these at some one time or another, and surely out of the vast array of writers that could be easily enumerated others besides McClellan might be contrasted with the great Virginian.

We have an abiding faith in the military genius of Lord Wolseley. It is fashionable, we know, to dismiss him with a sneer, and ridicule his capacity because he has only fought Zulus, negroes and Arabs. This is not all of the truth. He has fought Russians as well, the stubbornest race in all the history of war except the English, and a race that stands killing with something of the fatalism of the Turk, and much of the stoicism of the North American Indian.

General Jo Shelby once called upon Marshal Bazaine—that time he commanded the French in Mexico-on business for some of his old soldiers. They wanted to enlist under Bazaine, and Shelby went directly to the Marshal in their behalf. Business done, wine was brought. Over this the two men lingered longer than either thought. One episode of the conversation impressed Shelby much. Said Bazaine, in substance: "I should like more than you may imagine to meet this Grant of yours on the battlefield. He should pick fifty thousand Americans and I fifty thousand Frenchmen." Shelby answered with a smile, yet boldly: "In that event, Marshal, I fear much that you would be worsted.'

Something of a desire similar to Bazaine's must be felt by a great many to see Lord Wolseley in command of a British army that was to play its part upon some great European battlefield. It is then that we firmly believe he would prove himself to be another Marlborough. We do not say Wellington because Wellington was a mere episode in the great French drama then drawing rapidly toward its close. He entered by a back door into Spain when Napoleon was dreaming of Moscow. He found a nation in arms to meet him, and greet him, and help him against the invader. And of what a race of people was this nation composed! The Romans, world conquerors, never conquered Spain. Two of the Scipios perished there. Julius Cæsar left the old Iberians unsubdued in their mountains.

Hannibal barely escaped destruction there. The Saracens swept over the land like a tempest, and as suddenly subsided. The Moors staid longer, but were finally exterminated. And it was with the descendants of this invincible Spanish race that Napoleon was supposed to be fighting-lazily, languidly, and desultorily--when Wellington came. True, the demigod went in person once and ran everything into the ocean, British and all, but his heart was beyond the Niemen. He was pluming his eagles for that swoop upon Russia which was rewarded with St. Helena. We say Marlborough, therefore, and not Wellington. One thing Lord Wolseley appears never to have understood-nor any of the balance of the foreign authors for that matter that McClellan fought Lee in the splendid youth, vigor and physical development of the Southern Confederacy. Every soldier following this flag was a volunteer. The pride of emulation between the States begot a spirit of heroic endeavor that in its intensity was truly Homeric. Men rushed to battle as to a marriage feast. They clamored for it, they adorned themselves for it, they suffered and endured all things joyously for it, and, when once being in, so bore themselves that the world wondered how regiments of almost

boys as it were could endure to be decimated, and yet close up, shout, and go forward.

To meet this army of Northern Virginia, McClellan organized the Army of the Potomac. That army saved the Union. There is not a Federal general living or dead who could have faced Lee when he faced him and held his own as he held it; bedeviled as he was by the idiots at Washington; hated and betrayed by Stanton; thwarted by an insane fear forever rampant of the capital being in danger; his most completely prepared and cherished movements constantly interfered with; bewildered by a mass of chaotic and driveling orders sufficient to swamp a man-of-war; caressed to-day and banished to-morrow-to stand up against all these things, we say, and a multitude more just as hurtful, weakening and tormenting-and fight Lee week after week, retreating, it may be, but forever fighting, and losing nothing but the ground which he had first taken himself, is to prove McClellan the real hero and commander on the side of the Federals.

And yet Grant gets all the glory. For a time-yes. During this generation and another?-perhaps. The history, however, of these events has yet all to be written, Eulogy is not history, nor laudation, nor special pleas, nor messes of political pottage, nor favoritism, spread-eagleism and Badeauism. History is a surgeon. It goes at a thing knife in hand. It lays bare veins, nerves, arteries, bones, muscles, all the organs, the whole physical structure of man. Its nomenclature is inexorable. It covers up nothing, suppresses nothing, has no shame, burns no incense, worships no idols. It is the angel by the gate with truth's flaming sword in its hand. Never more into the garden can there come again its prostitutes, its revelers and its defilers.

When Grant came he had the country by the tail. He had only to grunt and the earth shook with the tread of reinforcements. He had only to crook one finger and Stanton fell upon his knees. He had only to sulk one day in his tent and there was crape on the doors of the executive mansion. At the rate of six to one he ground Lee to powder. That proportion of sheep could have overcome a lion. But for the grinding, as we have said, Grant got all the glory. So be it. The truth, the purity, the integrity and the priceless ability of such a man as McClellan are wonderfully out of place in a republic. Republics honor and adore only those things which happen to be in at the death.

CLEVELAND RETIRES TO PRIVATE LIFE.

[Kansas City Times, February 18, 1889.]

Precisely two weeks before the completion of his fifty-second birthday President Cleveland will retire from the chief magistracy of the Nation. He is in the full prime of his manhood; in the full perfection of his life and strength. He was the youngest, save one, of all the presidents, when inaugurated, General Grant being his junior by but a single year. He is now several years younger than a majority of the presidents were when elected. The future ought to be, and no doubt is, very fair before him.

He can with much

calmness and self-possession look forward to a long period of activity and usefulness in his profession, and it is with no little pride and satisfaction that his countrymen may regard his decision to return again to business. It settles for the time, and perhaps for all time,