Most persons imagine that infantry, armed with the modern long-range magazine-rifles, can go into battle, and shoot large numbers of an enemy, and that, if the infantry is numerous and daring enough and brave enough, they will be able to whip the enemy without the support of field artillery. This is a grave error. An army of a million men, consisting entirely of infantry, armed with modern shoulder-arms, would be completely over-matched and easily defeated by an army of 25,000 men amply equipped with modern field artillery. The infantry would be wholly unable to get within musket-range, because they would all be destroyed by the shrapnel of the enemy before they could get near enough to fire a single effective shot. A hundred thousand English, Germans, or Japanese, equipped with the longest and best modern field artillery, with plenty of ammunition and supply trains, air-scouts and engineer corps, could, in our present defenseless condition, march through this country as Xenophon's ten thousand marched through ancient Persia. They could cut their way through all opposition that we could offer. We have neither the infantry, nor the artillery, nor the cavalry, to oppose them, and the artillery we have is of so much shorter range that at no time could we get near enough to the enemy to reach him with our guns. If war comes between us and any of the Great Powers, the splendid young men of the country--husbands, fathers, sons, brothers, lovers--will have to go to the front and meet the invaders. If they go forward equipped with the necessary arms, ammunition, and enginery of war, and are well trained and well officered, then they will be able not only to hold their own against the invaders, with comparatively little loss of life, but also to repel and drive out the enemy and save our land from spoliation and our homes from despoliation. If, on the other hand, they are to be sent forward without the necessary arms, ammunition, and enginery, and without training, and incompetently or incompletely officered, as the pacifist propagandists and other sentimentalists are advising and planning that they be sent, then they will go just like lambs to the slaughter. The zone of fire in front of the enemy's trenches will be heaped high, acres wide and miles long, with their dead bodies; and writhing, groaning, shrieking, agonized forms of the wounded will crawl over and under the dead toward the hope of safety and mercy. Into such a hell are the hyper-sentimental peace sophists planning to send those you most love, those to whom you most cling, and on whom you most depend; and you are aiding and abetting the crime if you believe the words of these false reasoners. Every word you aim against necessary preparedness for war may, in the final reckoning, aim a gun at the heart of him whom you love more than all the world; and you might be able to say a word that would protect him with a gun.