The country refused to take the war seriously. A rich nation with seven million inhabitants should have easily put one hundred thousand men into the field, and should have found no difficulty in supporting them; but no inducement that the Government dared offer prevailed upon the people to risk life and property on a sufficient scale in 1812. The ranks of the army were to be filled in one of two ways,--either by enlistment in the regular service for five years, with pay at five dollars a month, sixteen dollars bounty, and on discharge three months pay and one hundred and sixty acres of land; or by volunteer organizations to the limit of fifty thousand men in all, officered under State laws, to serve for one year, with the pay of regular troops but without bounty, clothed, and in case of cavalry corps mounted, at their own expense. In a society where the day-laborers’ wages were nowhere less than nine dollars a month,[339] these inducements were not enough to supply the place of enthusiasm. The patriotic citizen who wished to serve his country without too much sacrifice, chose a third course,--he volunteered under the Act of Congress which authorized the President to call one hundred thousand State militia into service for six months; and upon this State militia Dearborn, Hull, Van Rensselaer, and Smyth were obliged chiefly to depend. If the war fever burned hotly in any part of the country Kentucky was the spot. There the whole male population was eager to prove its earnestness. When Henry Clay returned to Lexington after the declaration of war, he wrote to Monroe[340] that he was almost alarmed at the ardor his State displayed; about four hundred men had been recruited for the regular army, and although no one had volunteered for twelve months, the quota of six-months militia was more than supplied by volunteers. “Such is the structure of our society, however,” continued Clay, “that I doubt whether many can be engaged for a longer term than six months. For that term any force whatever which our population can afford may be obtained. Engaged in agricultural pursuits, you are well aware that from about this time, when the crop is either secured in the barn or laid by in the field until the commencement of the spring, there is leisure for any kind of enterprise.”