WAR is a great evil; but it is inevitable, and often-times necessary. If he who first reduced to rules the art of destroying his fellow-creatures, had no end in view but to gratify the passions of princes, he was a monster, whom it would have been happy to have smothered at his birth: but if his intention was the defence of perfected virtue, or the punishment of successful wickedness, to curb ambition, or to oppose the unjust claims of superior power, mankind ought to erect altars to his memory. War, in the last case, is the most necessary and useful of all the sciences: the various kinds of knowledge which ought to furnish the mind of a soldier are not without great difficulty to be attained. Of most other sciences the principles are fixed, or at least they may be ascertained by the assistance of experience; there needs nothing but diligence to learn them, or a particular turn of mind to practise them. Philosophy, mathematics, architecture, and many others, are all founded upon invariable combinations. Every man, even of a narrow understanding, may remember rules, apply them properly, and sometimes draw just consequences from them: but the study of war is of another kind. Experience can so seldom be referred to rules, that nothing but a mind enlightened by diligent study can make a due application of rules to circumstances. Most artists may join practice to theory, and make one perfect by the help of the other. The warrior has not always the like assistance: he spends part of his life in forming plans, of which humanity does not suffer him to wish the execution; and when he has an opportunity of judging from experience of the solidity of his principles, the operations are so rapid, the motions so diversified, the actions so confused, that he has scarcely time for a glimpse of those things which require the most calm and close consideration. In learning of every kind, theory is the completion; in the study of the military science, it is only the introduction. Many a man, depending on his rules, has found that the marches, the camps, the dispositions, the manoeuvres, performed with exact and strict order in the closet, have not only been very difficult, but even impracticable in the field. A disposition good in a mountainous country, would be bad in an open one; a disposition proper for one open country may fail in another, for want of foreseeing that a manoeuvre, which in one case may have been the cause of winning a battle, may in another occasion its loss: the circumstances of time and place almost always throw the best constructed systems out of order. It is therefore only by dint of study, and by the contemplation of cases incessantly varied, that the want of practice can be supplied, or action at least made less difficult. A military man who would be master of his profession, has no hours to lose; in peace, he ought to study with the greatest diligence; in time of war, he will see his principles open themselves of their own accord: his ideas are then more distinct; he acts with clearness and certainty in all cases he has foreseen, and applies his rules to all those which now occur for the first time, and which till then had escaped his thoughts. Who does not know that bravery, courage, and comprehension, are useless, and often fatal, to a military man who wants knowledge of his business? Having no previous helps