Baker, Secretary of War, whom he
frequently referred to with appropriate comment. Two months after
we entered the war, Mr. Baker issued an official bulletin in
which he admitted the "difficulty, disorder, and confusion in
getting things started, but," he said, "it is a happy confusion.
I delight in the fact that when we entered this war we were not,
like our adversary, ready for it, anxious for it, prepared for
it, and inviting it. Accustomed to peace, we were not ready."*
Could any one, except a very young child at a soap-bubble party
in the nursery, have spoken thus? But Mr. Baker was not a very
young child, he was a Pacifist; he did not write from a nursery,
but from the War Department of the United States. In the
following October he announced with undisguised
self-satisfaction: "We are well on the way to the battle-field."
This was too much for Roosevelt, who wrote: "For comparison with
this kind of military activity we must go back to the days of
Tiglath Pileser, Nebuchadnezzar and Pharaoh.
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