I came out upon this errand from Washington, and see what happened. Before I started everybody knew what errand I was bound on. I expected to meet quiet audiences and explain to them the issues of the day, and what did I meet? At every stop of the train multitudes of my fellow citizens crowded out, not to see the President of the United States merely he is not much to look at-but to declare their ardent belief in the majesty of the Government which he stands for and for the time being represents, and to declare in one fashion or another, if it were only by cheers, that they stood ready to do their duty in the hour of need. I have been thrilled by the experiences of these few days, and I shall go back to Washington and smile at anybody who tells me that the United States is not wide awake. But, gentlemen, crowds at the stations, multitudes in great audience halls, cheers for the Government, the display-the ardent display, as from the heart of the emblem of our Nation, the Stars and Stripes, only express the spirit of the Nation; they do not express the organized force of the Nation. And while I know, and knew before I left Washington, what the spirit of the people was, I have come out to ask them what their organization is and what they intend to make it.

Modern wars are not won by mere numbers. They are not won by mere enthusiasm. They are not won by mere national spirit. They are won by the scientific conduct of war, the scientific application of irresistible force. And what is there behind the President of the United States? Well, in the first place, there is a Navy, which, for my part, I am very proud of; a Navy, which for its numbers, ship by ship, man by man, officer by officer, I believe to be the equal of any navy in the world. But look at the great sweep of our coasts. Mind you, this war has engaged all the rest of the world outside of South America and the portion of North America occupied by the United States, and if this flame begins to creep in on us, it may, my fellow citizens,

creep in toward both coasts, and here are thousands upon thousands of miles of coast. Do you know that the great sweep from the canal up the coast to Alaska is something like half the circumference of the world? Do you remember the great reaches of sea from the canal up to the St. Lawrence River? Do you know the bays, the inviting harbors, the great cities which cluster upon those coasts? And do you think that a Navy that ranks only fourth in the world in force is enough to defend the coasts and make secure the territory of a great continent like this?

We have been interested in our Navy for a great many years, and we have been slowly building it up to excellent force, but we have done it piecemeal and a little at a time. There has been a party in Congress that was for a little Navy, as well as a party in Congress that was for a big Navy, and it seemed to me a sort of theoretical situation as to whether we wanted a Navy to be proud of or not. No nation ought to wish either an Army or Navy to be proud of, to make a display with, to make a toy of. It is the arm of force which must lie back of every sovereignty in the world, and the Navy of the United States must now be as rapidly as possible brought to a state of efficiency and of numerical strength which will make it practically impregnable to the navies of the world. The fighting force of the Navy now is splendid, and I should expect very great achievements from the fine officers and trained men that constitute it, but it is not big enough; it is not numerous enough; it is incomplete. It must be completed, and what the present administration is proposing is that we limit the number of years to five within which we shall complete a definite program which will make that Navy adequate for the defense of both coasts.

But, on land what stands behind the President, if he should have to act in your behalf to enforce the demands of the United States for respect and right? An Army so small that I have not had men enough to patrol the Mexican bor

der. The Mexican border is a very long border, I admit; it runs the whole southern length of Texas and the whole southern length of New Mexico and Arizona besides, and that is a great strip of noble territory. But what is that single border to the whole extent and coast of the United States? I have not had men enough to prevent bandits from raiding across the border of Mexico into the United States. It has been a very mortifying circumstance indeed. I have been tempted to advise Congress to help Texas build up its little force of Texas Rangers; and now, if you please, because I am asking the Congress to give the Government an Army adequate to the uses of peace, to the uses of the moment, some gentlemen go about and prate of military establishments. They see phantoms, they dream dreams. Militarism in the United States springing out of any of the proposals of this administration is-why, a man must have a very strong imagination indeed to conceive any such nonsense as that! I am not asking, the administration is not asking, to be backed by any bigger standing Army than is necessary for the uses of the moment, but it is asking this:

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Do you remember the experiences of the Spanish-American war? That was not much of a war, was it? It did not last very long. . . . What happened? You sent thousands of men to their death because they were ignorant. They did not get any farther than the camps in Florida. They did not get on the water even, much less get to Cuba, and they died in the camps like flies, of all sorts of camp diseases, of all sorts of diseases that come from the ignorance of medical science and camp sanitation. Splendid boys, boys fit, with a little training, to make an invincible army, but sent to their death by miserable disease, the soil of which was ignorance, helpless ignorance. Why, the percentage of our loss in that war by disease in the camp was greater than the percentage of the loss of the Japanese by disease and battle together in their war with Russia.

It is a very mortifying thing. There is not any place in

the world where medical science is more nobly studied or more adequately applied than in the United States, but we poured crude, ignorant, untrained boys into the ranks of those armies and they died before they got sight of an enemy. Do you want to repeat that? And while that is going on what may happen? What sort of disaster may come to you while you are trying to make an army out of absolutely raw material? Why, it seems almost ridiculous to state how little the present administration is asking for. It is asking that you give it something that is not mere raw material out of which to begin to make an army when it is absolutely necessary to make an army. It is asking that five hundred thousand men be asked to volunteer to take a little training every year for three years, not more than two or three months out of the year, in order that when volunteers are called for in the case of war we may have men, at least five hundred thousand of them, who know something about the use of arms, something about the sanitation of camps, something about the organization and discipline of war in the field and in the trenches. That is all that we are asking for at the present time, and if there is any criticism to be made upon it, it is that it is too little, not too much.

There are men in Congress asking, "Can you get the five hundred thousand men? Will they volunteer?" Why, I believe you could get them out of any one State in the Union. You could almost get five thousand of them out of this audience. But, ladies and gentlemen, do not forget that that is not all there is to this problem. Suppose that I knew that back of the insistence of the United States upon its rights was a great navy that ranked first in the world and a body of men trained to arms adequate, at any rate, to fend off any initial disaster to the United States while we were making a greater army ready. That would be only the beginning. There are other things that we have been very much concerned about in Washington and that we

are taking steps to attend to. The railroads of this country have never been drawn into the counsels of the Government, never until recently, in such fashion as to make plans for coordinating all of them, to transport troops and transport provisions and transport munitions in such a way as to be the effective arteries of the red blood and energy of the Nation; never until recently, though we are now beginning to do it, for we called the business men and the engineers of the country into counsel to say, "What are the resources of manufacture in this country, and how can we coordinate them and put them into cooperation, so that there will be no waste of time, no duplication of effort, and no failure to get every part of the machinery into operation should we need to use them in times of war?" We are taking counsel with regard to that now; but, mark you, the munitions of war are made in this country almost exclusively near the borders of the country, and for the most part upon the Atlantic seaboard, and any initial disaster to the force of the United States might put the greater part of them, if not all of them, in the possession of an enemy. So that you see the circle of my argument leads right back to the necessity for a force of men who can prevent an initial disaster, so that there will be no first failure, no first invasion, no first disaster.

Did you ever hear more momentous things spoken of than these? Did it ever before occur to you that you must put more than the authority of words into the mouths of men who speak for you? I have been wringing my heart and straining every energy of mind that I have to preserve the honor and integrity and peace of the United States, but think of what must lie at the back of my thought. I know what you want me to do. I would be ashamed if I did not use the utmost powers that are in me to do it. But suppose that some morning I should have to turn to you and say, "Fellow citizens, I have done as much as I can; now I must ask you to back me up with the force of the Nation." And