Page:Harris Dickson--The unpopular history of the United States.djvu/88

 months. As a further and ghastlier joke the President was empowered to require the governors of the States to hold in readiness to march at a moment’s notice a detachment of militia not exceeding 80,000 officers and men. The trouble is that such militia marched backwards much more fluently than they ever advanced forward. I’m going to tell you more about this presently, the harrowing story of how the capital of this nation fell.

When our relations with England and France were such that we only maintained an army of 2,000 to 3,000 men, it did not need officers. And for a dead certainty we did not have them. But when war stared us again in the face it was more than criminal neglect to find that after 25 years of independence we were entering another great struggle with officers scarcely more efficient than those whom Washington had deplored in the first years of the Revolution. Up to 1812 only 71 cadets had graduated from the Military Academy.

Then, although we had been expecting it for