"Better to speak softly and carry a big stick; keep your powder [gunpowder] dry; eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Old saws, you say. Yet, if you folks like comfort, security, three meals a day, and security for your children and your old age, you better remember these old sayings and pay heed to them; for they are the truth. "I know, I've proved them the hard way. Not in an easy chair, listening to the radio or out of a book, but with a gun in my hands in the jungles of the Philippines, and three years in France in World War I, after fifteen years in the National Guard getting ready for the world wars I saw in the making. That is what this book is about: human liberty. "It's been a good life, an extremely interesting one. This is the life story of an American working man; not fiction, but the facts of life as any honest man can find, if he is interested enough in his own affairs to run his life as a free man. As the old recipe for cooking a rabbit says: First, catch your rabbit!" - Charles Henry Craigie