First of all, I’d better warn you to turn the dial, if you don’t want to hear some shocking things about ourselves--things I daresay you haven’t heard before. You remember what Hegel said--“We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.” I think he meant that we just won’t say, “Because Mark Anthony, Aaron Burr and Belgium did those things, we won’t do them either.” O no, we must poke our nose right into the fire and get our fair eyebrows burnt off, before we beware. You and I often take singeings like that and charge them up to human nature. But as a people after our Revolution we took red-hot scorchings all over the face and down the body over and over again. Never did we profit less by the bungling of any activity than we did in those years following our escape into freedom. But I’d better tell you the facts and let you judge for yourself. And yet--I hesitate to tell them--these black things that our histories cover up with a sheet, a lily white sheet. As often as I have looked at them I still get a quake in the stomach. But maybe it’s best that we do look them in the face--in order to enter into the big charity of preventive medicine. Well here goes! After the Revolution, in the face of Washington’s pleading, Steuben’s example, and stout statesmen’s warnings, we cast out discipline and training like life boats from a new ship and reduced the army to eighty men. Then we put seven hundred on legal paper, who couldn’t be raised or kept going. Three years after the war we had for the common defense less than a thousand men poorly equipped and trained and scattered in the lonely forts on our borders--the equivalent of one hundred policemen on the outskirts of Boston today, with none in the city. So when Daniel Shay organized his rebellion, forced the court to adjourn and marched on Springfield, he had things pretty much his own way. It was only after tumult and bloodshed that peace was restored, whereas a small, well-trained force at hand would doubtless have kept the uprising from even starting. But the people refused to look at this picture--refused to take out preventives or insurance against the dreadful happenings to follow. Even when the United States became a nation and our Constitution was adopted, we had an army of the magnificent size of five hundred ninety-five men. Can you believe it? But listen to the consequence of this neglect. Seven years after Revolution, one thousand souls in Kentucky alone perished by tomahawk and arrow, with no one to protect them. Then a force of hastily recruited men in Ohio were ambushed and wiped out. The next year fourteen hundred quickly raised defenders were also annihilated. And of course our weakness furnished the savage with a new courage for depredations, so that the thousands of persons who perished cannot now even be estimated. There was only one bright spot in this decade of terror. Washington, despite the laxness of the country, selected