our people rushing into future extravagance, unnecessary slaughter and possible defeat. For somehow war has a habit of sneaking up on us craftily and quickly, like a thug. _VI_ THE UPHILL GAME How about giving our imaginations a little exercise for a minute before we start in on the evening’s story. Are we set for the effort? Well, here’s the picture. Just suppose a great plague of flu were to sweep this country from end to end. And suppose there were not a single doctor or nurse in the United States. Now suppose that Congress, all excited, voted great numbers of doctors and nurses to stem the scourge. Well, how many people would die, and how much neglect and horror would visit our doorways, while the doctors and nurses were being trained and educated? Just go over in your mind that little chaos and you have almost a view of the War of 1812--almost--for then we went this fancied epidemic one better. We didn’t provide training and education at all for the doctors and nurses--the officers and men of that calamity. The plague of war just went along from bad to worse--and then from worse to awful. There was much excuse for our slips before and during the Revolution, when we were a loose lot of colonies and were divided into Whigs and Tories. But by 1812 we had been a nation for over twenty years. Few realized then, and some don’t now, that the soldier needs just as much preparation and education as the doctor and the nurse. For preparedness against war and shortening a war amount to a vast science and art which cannot be trusted to quacks without undue loss of life to our sons. After our narrow escape from this plague of 1812, when our enemy providentially was called back to Europe, we didn’t do away with our preventive medicine, as we did after the Revolution. No sir, we kept that training for three whole months. Then we reduced it to ten thousand men on paper. Five years later, in the face of protests by such men as John C. Calhoun, we cut it to six thousand men. Then the Seminoles, Creeks and Black Hawk promptly entered into the gentle art of taking scalps. Settlers were slain. Dade’s Command of one hundred seven officers and men marching on a peaceful errand were massacred. Other officers and civilians were mowed down. Cholera attacked the troops against Black Hawk, and yellow fever took its toll of those against the Seminoles. In the Florida, Georgia and Alabama country a force of less than a thousand trained troops tried to keep safe a vast unexplored country against three thousand Indians. By 1834, for the whole of the United States, less than four thousand troops attempted to guard over ten thousand miles of seacoast and frontier for fifteen million people. Two years later, after these killings had been going on for some time, our legislators with frenzied haste voted our army to be raised back to ten thousand. But the troops could not be had or trained in time. So the slaughter went on. Mr. Hearst