At a game of bridge, a player once tried to excuse himself to his partner for trumping his ace, “But you see,” he said, “I’m just learning.” Said the partner, “That’s the devil of it--you’re _not_.” Just why our country didn’t learn after three wars, two of which we actually lost through the _absence_ of training, and one of which we won _because_ of training, is a mystery to more than good bridge players. Well, we didn’t learn, for right after the Mexican War, we reduced our trained force to the size it was shortly after our miserable War of 1812, thirty-six years before. And we made this astounding reduction, in the face of an increase in our population of twelve millions, and in our territory, of nearly a million square miles. The soldier was almost immediately put up against an impossible task. He was sprinkled about so thinly beyond the Mississippi that often he despaired of his own existence. A paltry seven thousand struggled against hundreds of thousands of Indians for the sake of the settler. Besides, the western land was familiar to the savage and strange to the soldier. The odds against this meager force were increased when gold was discovered in California, when the forty-niner came along. The soldier had to build forts, roads and trails--and escort the endless caravans of wagon trains over the prairie, if the settler was to arrive safely in our coast states. Meanwhile uprisings of Apaches, Yumas, Navajos, Cheyenne and the deadly Sioux had to be repulsed. Tardy increases of the trained force by Congress came far behind the heels of the unwarranted killings. By 1861 the entire army, trained only in small actions, numbered a little over fifteen thousand men. And eighty-four per cent of this force was scattered so completely and remotely from Washington, that it would have taken months to collect them. We sat through all this, like the man watching for weeks the flood approaching his house, and making no attempt to remove his furniture, or get a boat. We watched the skies grow darker and crooned, “It ain’t goin’ to rain no more.” For thirty years the North had been trying to black the South’s industrial eye, and the South had as vigorously defied the threats. Violent abolitionists, cartoonists, pamphleteers and novelists had been using hot words and making insulting gestures at each other. Yet the Yankee, doubling one fist and opening the other, kept saying, “O, no there won’t be a war. Brother couldn’t fight brother. Even if there is one, it can’t last.” When South Carolina seceded four months before the conflict, and six states followed her example, we did not wake up to the protection of our youth. When nearly one-fourth of the army, with its proportion of government property in Texas, was surrendered to the South, we did nothing to overcome the loss. When we saw the South call out one hundred thousand men for a year’s service, we sat like spectators on the bleachers. We let the Confederates seize the arsenals in their