We sometimes find men who have become eminent in the pulpit and at the bar, or in medicine and the sciences, without ever having enjoyed the advantages of an education in academic or collegiate halls, and perhaps even without that preliminary instruction usually deemed necessary for professional pursuits.

Shall we therefore abolish all our colleges, theological seminaries, schools of law and medicine, our academies and primary schools, and seek for our professional men among the uneducated and the ignorant?
If professional ignorance be a recommendation in our generals, why not also in our lawyers and our surgeons?
If we deem professional instruction requisite for the care of our individual property and health, shall we require less for guarding the honor and safety of our country, the reputation of our arms, and the lives of thousands of our citizens?
But in reality, were not these men to whom we have alluded eminent in their several professions _in spite of,_ rather than _by means of_ their want of a professional education?
And have not such men, feeling the disadvantages under which they were forced to labor, been almost without exception the advocates of education in others?
But is it true that most of the generals of distinction in the more recent wars were men destitute of military education,--men who rose from the ranks to the pinnacle of military glory, through the combined influence of ignorance of military science and contempt for military instruction?
Let us glance at the lives of the most distinguished of the generals of the French Revolution, for these are the men to whom reference is continually made to prove that the Military Academy is an unnecessary and useless institution, the best generals being invariably found in the ranks of an army, and _not_ in the ranks of military schools.

Facts may serve to convince, where reasoning is of no avail.
Napoleon himself was a pupil of the military schools of Brienne and Paris, and had all the advantages of the best military and scientific instruction given in France.
Dessaix was a pupil of the military school of Effiat, with all the advantages which wealth and nobility could procure.

Davoust was a pupil of the military school of Auxerre, and a fellow-pupil with Napoleon in the military school of Paris.

Kleber was educated at the military school of Bavaria.