It may well be that the Swiss on an average can be made into good troops quicker than our own men; but most assuredly there would be numbers of Americans who would not be behind the Swiss in such a matter. A body of volunteers of the kind I am describing would of course not be as good as a body of regulars of the same size, but they would be immeasurably better than the average soldiers produced by any system we now have or ever have had in connection with our militia. Our regular army would be strengthened by them at the very beginning and would be set free in its entirety for immediate aggressive action; and in addition a levy in mass of the young men of the right age would mean that two or three million troops were put into the field, who, although not as good as regulars, would at once be available in numbers sufficient to overwhelm any expeditionary force which it would be possible for any military power to send to our shores. The existence of such a force would render the immediate taking of cities like San Francisco, New York, or Boston an impossibility and would free us from all danger from sudden raids and make it impossible even for an army-corps to land with any prospect of success. Our people are so entirely unused to things military that it is probably difficult for the average man to get any clear idea of our shortcomings. Unlike what is true in the military nations of the Old World, here the ordinary citizen takes no interest in the working of our War Department in time of peace. No President gains the slightest credit for himself by paying attention to it. Then when a crisis comes and the War Department breaks down, instead of the people accepting what has happened with humility as due to their own fault during the previous two or three decades, there is a roar of wrath against the unfortunate man who happens to be in office at the time. There was such a roar of wrath against Secretary Alger in the Spanish War. Now, as a matter of fact, ninety per cent of our shortcomings when the war broke out with Spain could not have been remedied by any action on the part of the Secretary of War. They were due to what had been done ever since the close of the Civil War.