In a little over two years the main army of the East had in succession as commanders McDowell, McClellan, Pope, McClellan, Burnside, Hooker and Meade. In the whirlpool of mismanagement, heads fell fast. And subordinate generals notoriously feared most being placed in command of the Army of the Potomac. Certainly the whole fault couldn’t lie with six different commanders. With the same system--or lack of it--sixteen would probably have failed. Certainly _one_ could have been wisely selected who could have gone on, if properly backed up. The answer lies in the Confederacy. There, a single trained and experienced man picked a trained commander and placed him over better trained and organized troops than the North had. He was held on whether he won or lost and became more capable as he proceeded. This sample of management and organization, always a few steps ahead of the North is why the South held off the Union against odds of three to one for four staggering years. That is what was done while the Yankee was paying millions in bounties for recruits, uselessly wasting his men, undergoing draft riots and enduring one of the ablest _mis_managements our country has seen. The lack of any action before the war--any wakefulness from our deep sleep--any use of ordinary sense plunged us into the waste of wastes and told the world ever since that we were the incompetent of incompetents. And for all this the North paid nearly ten billion dollars. And how we spent lives. Why, we were in such a rush at the beginning that we sent in three hundred thousand men without even examining them physically. Think of what that meant in mortality. We fed our manhood like babes into the burning cauldron of Moloch, all because we sat and waited with no idea of a preventive in those years and months before the war. Experts, foreign and domestic, agree that if we had had a trained force in the East in December 1860, of not more than twenty-five thousand, the war could not have lasted over three months, with a maximum of a thousand casualties. As it was in the North alone we threw away three hundred sixty thousand lives. With the South counted we filled prodigally way over a half million graves. No, we don’t care to snuff things out at the source. We prefer to dam them at the mouth. We do that with crime. Why not do it with war? _IX_ FIDDLING Do you remember the pillow shams of the gay nineties? For those of you who don’t, I’ll tell you that they were clean, ruffled upright coverings for pillows in the daytime. When they were laid aside at night, they revealed too often a certain amount of real estate underneath. What a cleanly view for the daily visitor and what an unpleasant surprise for the nightly sleeper. I remember such a set of shams. On the left one were embroidered in pink the words: “I slept and dreamed that life was beauty.” On the right one in blue: “I woke and found that life was duty.”