This is no new thing in our history. If only we were willing to learn from our defeats and failures instead of paying heed purely to our successes, we would realize that what I have above described is one of the common phases of our history. In the War of 1812, at the outset of the struggle, American forces were repeatedly beaten, as at Niagara and Bladensburg, by an enemy one half or one quarter the strength of the American army engaged. Yet two years later these same American troops on the northern frontier, when trained and commanded by Brown, Scott, and Ripley, proved able to do what the finest troops of Napoleon were unable to do, that is, meet the British regulars on equal terms in the open; and the Tennessee backwoodsmen and Louisiana volunteers, when mastered and controlled by the iron will and warlike genius of Andrew Jackson, performed at New Orleans a really great feat. During the year 1812 the American soldiers on shore suffered shameful and discreditable defeats, and yet their own brothers at sea won equally striking victories, and this because the men on shore were utterly unprepared and because the men at sea had been thoroughly trained and drilled long in advance. Exactly the same lessons are taught by the histories of other nations. When, during the Napoleonic wars, a small force of veteran French soldiers landed in Ireland they defeated without an effort five times their number of British and Irish troops at Castlebar. Yet the men whom they thus drove in wild flight were the own brothers of and often the very same men who a few years later, under Wellington, proved an overmatch for the flower of the French forces. The nation that waits until the crisis is upon it before taking measures for its own safety pays heavy toll in the blood of its best and its bravest and in bitter shame and humiliation. Small is the comfort it can then take from the memory of the times when the noisy and feeble folk in its own ranks cried “Peace, peace,” without taking one practical step to secure peace.