indeed, against their own army.  ‘The militia thereupon broke and fled’ recurs with tiresome frequency in numberless dispatches.  Yet the consequent charges of cowardice are nearly all unjust.  The fellow-countrymen of those sailors who fought the American frigates so magnificently were no special kind of cowards.  But, as a raw militia, they simply were to well-trained regulars what children are to men.

American Non-Combatant Services.  There were more than fifty thousand deaths reported on the American side; yet not ten thousand men were killed or mortally wounded in all the battles put together.  The medical department, like the commissariat and transport, was only organized at the very last minute, even among the regulars, and then in a most haphazard way.  Among the militia these indispensable branches of the service were never really organized at all.

Such disastrous shortcomings were not caused by any lack of national resources.  The population o the United States was about eight millions, as against eighteen millions in the British Isles.  Prosperity was general; at all events, up to the time that it was checked by Jefferson’s Embargo Act.  The finances were also thought to be most satisfactory.  On the very eve of war the Secretary of the Treasury reported that the national debt had been reduced by forty-six million dollars since his party had come into power.  Had this ‘war party’ spent those millions on its Army and Navy, the war itself might have had an ending more satisfactory to the United States.

Let us now review the forces on the British side.

The eighteen million people in the British Isles were naturally anxious to avoid war with the eight millions in the United States.  They had enough on their hands as it was.  The British Navy was being kept at a greater strength than ever before; though it was none too strong for the vast amount of work it had to do.  The British Army was waging its greatest Peninsular campaign.  All the other naval and military services of what was already a world-wide empire had to be maintained.  One of the most momentous crises in the world’s history was fast approaching; for Napoleon, arch-enemy of England and mightiest of modern conquerors, was marching on Russia with five hundred thousand men.  Nor was this all.  There were troubles at home as well as dangers abroad.  The king had gone mad the year before.  The prime minister had recently been assassinated.  The strain of nearly twenty years of war was telling severely on the nation.  It was no time to take on a new enemy, eight millions strong, especially one who supplied so many staple products during peace and threatened both the sea flank of the mother country and the land flank of Canada during war.