THE ENGLISH AND AMERICAN
to the bad quality of the men: "the spirits of such base and mean fellows" were not "able to encounter gentlemen that have honour and courage and resolution in them" and it was necessary to get "men of a spirit that will go on as far as gentlemen will go," men that "had the fear of God before them, and made some conscience of what they did." The disparity which at first existed between the Federal and the Confederate cavalry was due to a different cause to physical rather than moral deficiencies: man for man the horsemen of the South were better riders and better shots, and at the time they were better organised and better led. The Southern infantry, taking them as a whole, were better marksmen than those of the North, owing to the different conditions of life in the two sections of the country. But the success of the Southern armies during the early part of the war was also due to the difference in the social organisation of South and North. In the South, as Mr Goldwin Smith puts it, "the gentry were accustomed
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