"_If tomorrow any first-class military power should attack the United States in force and should succeed in getting her warships and soldier-laden transports past our fleet, landed out of range of our coast defenses, once fairly ashore she could pulverize our small regular army and punish us to a humiliating degree, if not actually make us sue for peace, before we could raise and train a volunteer army adequate to cope with the invaders. In other words, at present our navy is our only considerable bulwark against invasion. Even such part of our militia as we could depend on and the available regular army would make an extremely small force, our army being in size only a local police force, well trained and highly efficient indeed, but in numbers little more than twice the size of the police force of New York City--that is, not large enough for our great country even as a mere police force._" * * * * * Let us, for argument's sake, assume for a moment that we were to be invaded with an army of only a hundred thousand men, trained, equipped, and supplied with the supreme adequacy with which the troops of the other Great Powers are trained, equipped, and supplied. The enemy would line up in a battle-front three times as long as our little thirty thousand could be stretched with equal powers of concentration, or if our thirty thousand were to be stretched out a hundred miles we should be at least three times as weak as the enemy at any point of attack, even were our thirty thousand to be as well equipped and as well supplied as the troops of the enemy. But we should be without the requisite field artillery, and the artillery that we should have would be without the requisite training. We should be without the needed cavalry, and our cavalry would be without proper organization and experience. We should be without ammunition trains, and very short of ammunition. Our troops, hustled together, and rushed to the front for the first time to face a real enemy, would be unprepared to behave like an army, and, what is very important, they would have no hope of success. Despair would be in the heart of every man. Both officers and men would know that there were no ready resources, no reserves and reserve supplies behind them, and no adequate arrangements for providing any. Every man of the thirty thousand would know that he was being sacrificed in atonement for national blundering, just as at Balaklava the noble Six Hundred were by a blunder sacrificed in the charge of the Light Brigade. PREPONDERANCE OF GUN-FIRE