f us, of you, my reader,
and of myself, and of those like us, because we had permitted conditions
to be such as to render these men unfit for command. Take a stout
captain of an out-of-the-way two-company post, where nothing in the
world ever occurred even resembling military action, and where the only
military problem that really convulsed the post to its foundations was
the quarrel between the captain and the quartermaster as to how high a
mule's tail ought to be shaved (I am speaking of an actual incident).
What could be expected of such a man, even though thirty-five years
before he had been a gallant second lieutenant in the Civil War, if,
after this intervening do-nothing period, he was suddenly put in command
of raw troops in a midsummer campaign in the tropics?

The bureau chiefs were for the most part elderly incompetents, whose
idea was to do their routine duties in such way as to escape the
censure of routine bureaucratic superiors and to avoid a Congressional
investigation. They had not the slightest conception of preparing
the army for war. It was impossible that they could have any such
conception. The people and the Congress did not wish the army prepared
for war; and those editors and philanthropists and peace advocates who
felt vaguely that if the army were incompetent their principles were
safe, always inveighed against any proposal to make it efficient, on the
ground that this showed a natural bloodthirstiness in the proposer. When
such were the conditions, it was absolutely impossible that either the
War Department or the army could do well in the event of war. Secretary
Alger happened to be Secretary when war broke out, and all the
responsibility for the shortcomings of the Department were visited
upon his devoted head. He was made the scapegoat for our National
shortcomings. The fault was not his; the fault and responsibility
lay with us, the people, who for thirty-three years had permitted our
representatives in Congress and in National executive office to bear
themselves so that it was absolutely impossible to avoid the great bulk
of all the trouble that occurred, and of all the shortcomings of which
our people complained, during the Spanish War. The chief immediate cause
was the conditions of red-tape bureaucracy which existed in the War
Department at Washington, which had prevented any good organization
or the preparation of any good plan of operation for using our men and
supplies. The recurre