minority of the Special Committee on Conscription of the House of Representatives.

If it is found impracticable to apply the reserve force to this service as its chief and permanent duty, then an effort should be made to raise a permanent force for this special duty.

I believe it may be done thus: For each Congressional district one company of not less than sixty men, armed and equipped as infantry or cavalry, as the locality may demand, to be officered from the Invalid Corps or officers found unfit for field duty (the latter preferable), and to be composed of such light-duty men between seventeen and fifty years as can be properly assigned, and such robust men between sixteen and seventeen and fifty and sixty years of age as can be obtained, and enlisted for the war for this service.

I believe 100 such companies may be obtained in sixty days. A vigorous use of all this material of law and military force would probably suffice to alleviate if not to remedy fully the existing evil and render the chance of continued absence so precarious as to prevent the extensive recurrence of desertion. The plan certainly directs to the purpose the entire power of the States and the Confederacy, except the troops actually in the field. Their use for this purpose is out of the question. It is easiliy tried if the States and the Congress are loyal to the extreme exigency of the country. Laws can be prepared and passed in thirty days provided they have the sanction of the President, the Secretary of War, and General Lee, and the organization may proceed pari passu.

It is expensive. If the public liberty depends on the armies and the armies depend for efficiency on the return of absentees, the expense is warranted.

There are accessories to this plan which may be used perhaps with good positive or auxiliary effect:

First. The instant assignment of the entire reserve forces to the duty, requiring the officers in command to take the field in person and perform it.

Second. The judicious use of amnesty, even to go further than hitherto proposed.

Third. Carefully distributed detachments from the Army.

Fourth. By general order requiring every commissioned officer not actually in the field to regard the arrest of deserters as a part of his duty, and also requiring all employes of the Government to report to the nearest authority cases known to them. This would embrace all the agents of the Quartermaster's and Commissary Departments and all others.

Fifth. Making by general order the fact of a deserter being found in a command to which he does not belong a grave offense on the part of the officer having him.

There may be others of a temporary, local, or occasional character which may be brought into operation by the intelligence and vigilance of officers.

I think it unnecessary to discuss the inefficiency of the expedients hitherto used or proposed.

The one proposed by General Pillow was fully tried under auspices of the highest authority and failed almost ridiculously. Those proposed by the bill recently passed by the Senate will fail in like manner, the object of that bill being simply not to provide for the duties proposed, but to abolish the regulations organized by the Secretary of