was of four years, but the law forbade any entrance examinations on
subjects outside of the usual work done in the rural common schools.
The biographies of Grant, of Sherman, of Sheridan, of Ormsby
Mitchell, and of others show that they in fact had little or no
other preparatory education than that of the common country school.
[Footnote: Grant, in his Personal Memoirs (vol. i. p. 24), says of
the school in his early Ohio home, that the highest branches taught
there were "the three R's,--Reading, 'Riting, and 'Rithmetic. I
never saw," he says, "an algebra or other mathematical work higher
than the arithmetic, in Georgetown, until after I was appointed to
West Point. I then bought a work on algebra in Cincinnati, but
having no teacher it was Greek to me."] The course of study and
amount of education given must necessarily be limited, therefore, to
what boys of average ability and such preparation could accomplish
in the four years. They were no further advanced, on entering, than
they would have to be to enter any ordinary fitting school for one
of our first-class colleges, or the high schools in the graded
systems of public schools in our cities. Three years of study would
put them abreast of students entering college elsewhere, and four
years would carry them about as far as the end of the Freshman year
in Yale, Harvard, or Princeton. The corps of professors and teachers
at West Point has always deservedly ranked high as instructors, but
there is no "royal road" to knowledge, and it cannot be claimed that
three or four years at the Military Academy would count for more, as
general education, than the same period spent in any other good
school. A very few men of high standing in the classes supplemented
their education by obtaining appointments as temporary instructors
in the academy after graduating, but most of them left their books
behind them and began at once the subaltern's life at the distant
frontier post.