quotes Alfred Henry Lewis as saying that a Congressman is like a man riding backwards in a train. He never sees anything till after it has passed. Well, that may be a little unfair to our legislators, but it surely applied to these enactments. For what happened afterwards? The usual waste and ineffectiveness. General after general on the frontier asked to be relieved of command because of the impossibility of the task, the smallness of the force and the wholesale, needless deaths. Of the trained men in this Seminole War over forty-one per cent perished--nearly half of all the troops--and to little purpose. One hundred seventeen of our best officers, in one year, seeing the fruitlessness of their services resigned from the army rather than to be a party to stagnation. Among them were such prominent men as Horace Bliss, W. C. Young, R. R. Parrott, Alexander D. Bache, Albert Sydney Johnston, N. B. Buford, Leonidas Polk, Jefferson Davis, Joseph E. Johnston and George G. Meade. By 1842 the army in the face of the want of a strong national police force was reduced to eighty-six hundred and thirteen men. A Congressman on the floor of the house stated in that year: “We have no prospects of war. We have more reason to suppose that the world will grow wiser and that the humane and oft-repeated wish of the wise and good, that the sword and bayonet may be converted into the scythe and ploughshare, will be realized.” We have no prospects of war! Four years after this statement, came the War with Mexico like a bolt out of the red, white and blue. It found our seventeen million people with an army of fifty-three hundred men all told, or what would correspond for a university of seventeen hundred students to a football squad of six men. Six whole men. Think of that. A line, all but one man, no backs and no substitutes. Of course, you couldn’t play the game at all, under those circumstances. Well, as the Mexican War was in sight General Zachary Taylor had to. He had to fight with less than that. He had just three thousand troops against a possible fifty thousand Mexicans. Even so, his command was the largest regular force we had assembled since the Revolution. Whatever the rights and wrongs of this war were, Taylor was in a perilous position. When hostilities came, he had to go forward with his little band of trained soldiers. Against superior forces he won the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma. Then he was held up. Untrained volunteers poured in upon him too late--right in the midst of campaign--just as applicants for a medical school might rush in and clog up a busy hospital. Imagine that situation, hundreds of novices running around the corridors and into the wards of a big hospital. Would the doctors be crazy? Taylor’s position was worse. The government had forced him to keep these men in his institution and many of them hadn’t the inclination to learn, many had come out for a lark, and all of them had