Let them realize this fact and do all they can to remedy the wrong they have committed. Let Congress realize its own shortcomings. Far-reaching and thoroughgoing treatment, continued for a period of at least two and in all probability three years, is needed if the navy is to be placed on an equality, unit for unit, no less than in the mass, with the navies of England, Germany, and Japan. In the present war the deeds of the _Emden_, of the German submarines, of Von Spee’s squadron, have shown not merely efficiency but heroism; and the navies of Great Britain and Japan have been handled in masterly manner. Have the countrymen of Farragut, of Cushing, Buchanan, Winslow, and Semmes, of Decatur, Hull, Perry, and MacDonough, lost their address and courage, and are they willing to sink below the standard set by their forefathers? It has been said that the United States never learns by experience but only by disaster. Such method of education may at times prove costly. The slothful or short-sighted citizens who are now misled by the cries of the ultrapacificists would do well to remember events connected with the outbreak of the war with Spain. I was then Assistant Secretary of the Navy. At one bound our people passed from a condition of smug confidence that war never could occur (a smug confidence just as great as any we feel at present) to a condition of utterly unreasoning panic over what might be done to us by a very weak antagonist. One governor of a seaboard State announced that none of the National Guard regiments would be allowed to respond to the call of the President because they would be needed to prevent a Spanish invasion of that State--the Spaniards being about as likely to make such an invasion as we were to invade Timbuctoo or Turkestan. One congressman besought me to send a battle-ship to protect Jekyll Island, off the coast of Georgia. Another congressman asked me to send a battle-ship to protect a summer colony which centred around a large Atlantic-coast hotel in Connecticut. In my own neighborhood on Long Island clauses were gravely inserted into the leases of property to the effect that if the Spaniards destroyed the property the leases should terminate. Chambers of commerce, boards of trade, municipal authorities, leading business men, from one end of the country to the other, hysterically demanded, each of them, that a ship should be stationed to defend some particular locality; the theory being that our navy should be strung along both seacoasts, each ship by itself, in a purely defensive attitude--thereby making certain that even the Spanish navy could pick them all up in detail. One railway president came to protest to me against the choice of Tampa as a point of embarkation for our troops, on the ground that his railway was entitled to its share of the profit of transporting troops and munitions of war and that his railway went to New Orleans. The very senators and congressmen who had done