531. ARMY, Seniority in.—[further continued].
When you have new corps
to raise you are free to prefer merit: and our
mechanical law of promotion, when once
men have been set in their places, makes it
most interesting indeed to place them originally
according to their capacities. It is not
for me even to ask whether in the raw regiments
now to be raised, it would not be advisable
to draw from the former the few
officers who may already have discovered
military talent, and to bring them forward
in the new corps to those higher grades, to
which, in the old, the blocks in their way do
not permit you to advance them?—
To General Armstrong.
Ford ed., ix, 380.
(M.
Feb. 1813)
See Generals.
