WRITINGS OF 5AM HOUSTON, 1858
519
Treasury of this nation, but I wish to do it on some rational prin- ciples. I _wish to do it by the employment of volunteers. We are told that there is a costliness about volunteers; that they are more expensive than regular soldiers. That may be true; but I doubt it. At all events, volunteers are generally paid after they render their service; regular troops are paid in advance. Volunteers furnish their own horses, if they are cavalry or dragoons, and they are paid for after they have performed the deed. But, in advance of the organization of the regular corps, the United States purchase and pay for the cavalry and dragoon horses that they use. There is the difference. You can make any calculation, show anything you please from the War Department, if there is a desire on the part of the Government to increase the regular Army; but they do not stand investigation when you come to test them. Would three thousand volunteers, employed for one or two years, cost more than the same number of men added to the regular Army for five, ten, or any number of years? It is said that each regiment costs about a million a year. Suppose volunteers should cost two million a year, and you keep them but two years in the field : the expense would be four millions. If you were to keep the same number of regular troops four years in the field, besides fastening them on the country as a perpetual expense, you would exhaust the same amount of the public Treasury. I do not believe, notwithstanding all the calculations that have been made, that volunteer troops are more expensive than regu- lars. I could show this by the celerity of volunteers. If there be an emergency, such as is stated by gentlemen, how is it to be met? Is it not by present action? Is it not to be promptly done? Are we to protract the war from year to year? Are we to take more than a year to fill up three regiments, and are all operations to remain suspended until we raise this additional force? If it is necessary, if this is the purpose, you cannot move those already advancing on Utah. They must be supplied there; each ration will cost at least a dollar, and the expense of each man there, instead of being $1,000 or $1,500, according to the estimate made, will amount to $2,000, at the rate at which provisions will have to be supplied them. I cannot, for the life of me, see what advan- tage is to result to the Government, on the score of economy, by taking regulars instead of volunteers. The troops that will volunteer their services will be healthy, active, efficient men, of suitable age and connections for the bene- fit of the country. I would infinitely prefer them to men who
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