ADDRESSES OF MAJOR LACEY 243 



or soldier who saw the turning point and caught the situ- 

 ation in time and turned defeat into victory by some move 

 not ordered by the master of the game. The real hero of 

 that war was the private soldier. 



When the war closed many were the forebodings of the 

 results of the return of those great armies to civil life. 

 It was freely prophesied that the soldiers would fill our 

 poor-houses, our jails, and our penitentiaries, but the 

 world was disappointed in the result. These conse- 

 quences have often followed the disbanding of armies; 

 but the result depends upon the kind of an army that has 

 disbanded. 



Macaulay tells us the result of the mustering out of the 

 Puritanic army of Cromwell, when the Stuarts again 

 ascended the throne, was : 



The troops were now disbanded. Fifty thousand men, accus- 

 tomed to the profession of arms, were at once thrown on the 

 world; and experience seemed to warrant the belief that this 

 throng would produce much misery and crime; that the dis- 

 charged veterans would be seen begging in every street, or would 

 be driven by hunger to pillage. But no such result followed. 

 In a few months there remained not a trace indicating that the 

 most formidable army in the world had just been absorbed with 

 the mass of the community. The royalists themselves confessed 

 that, in every department of honest industry the discarded war- 

 riors prospered beyond other men; that none was charged with 

 any theft or robbery ; that none was heard to ask alms ; and that 

 if a baker, a mason, or a wagoner attracted notice by his dil- 

 igence and sobriety he was, in all probability, one of Oliver's old 

 soldiers. 



Unlike the soldiers of Cromwell, however, the armies 

 of the war of '61, when they returned home, took their 

 positions in every avenue and walk of civil life. No place 

 was too good for them; no position was too high for 

 them. 



The name of the general who commanded is merely the 



