Military Ends and Moral Means. By Col J. J. Graham.
(Smith, Elder, and Co.)—Colonel Graham has produced a book which is extremely well worth reading, yet not a good book. His subject is not very well defined by the title, which should rather be "Moral Means to the Attain- ment of Military Ends," the word moral being used as the opposite, not of "immoral," but of "physical." Thus he discusses the various methods by which officers may attain moral ascendancy over their men, and allots separate chapters to military eloquence and the effect of music. Perhaps the long and valuable chapter on stratagems illustrates better than any other the merits and defects of the author. It hardly makes the slightest effort to distinguish between stratagems which are morally blameable or the reverse, but merely enumerates all the remark- able instances of contrivances to surprise or deceive an enemy with which the author's reading has acquainted him. This reading has been very wide, but it would seem as if Colonel Graham had simply entered every instance of a stratagem he met with in books in his note- book under one of five different heads, and then had printed the con- tents of his note-book. His examples drawn from modern, media3val, classical, and Biblical history, are all jumbled up together without chronological or indeed any arrangement. Thus the work is rather a collection of valuable materials than a book—a pile of ore, not smelted metal.
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