General Luke E. Wright of Memphis, who was Secretary of War the latter part of the second Roosevelt Administration, was among the visitors to the conference, and said he was in thorough sympathy with the aims of the National Security League. In his opinion the American first line of defense, to be immediately available for service, should be at least 300,000 men. An audience composed of nearly as many women as men heard in Carnegie Hall, on the evening of June 15, the arguments of Alton B. Parker, Dr. Lyman Abbott, Henry L. Stimson, ex-Secretary of War; Charles J. Bonaparte, ex-Attorney General, and Jacob M. Dickinson, ex-Secretary of War, advocating immediate increases in the army and navy as the best safeguard against war. Ex-Judge Parker, who was Chairman of the meeting, struck the keynote of the conference in these words: "We want to arouse the people of the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific, to the end that they shall let Congress know that they have made up their minds to spend a little of that $187,000,000,000 of which we boast in order that our wives and our children and our grandchildren shall not be visited with the calamity which has befallen Belgium." Two features of the conference were the reading of a letter to Hudson Maxim from ex-President Theodore Roosevelt and a speech on naval unpreparedness by George von L. Meyer, ex-Secretary of the Navy. The speech is reproduced below in part, and the letter from Mr. Roosevelt in full, together with the resolution of the conference. MR. ROOSEVELT'S LETTER. My Dear Mr. Maxim: I thank you heartily for your book on "Defenseless America." It is a capital book and I believe it is safe to say that no wise and patriotic American can fail to recognize the service that you have rendered in writing it. I hope it will have the widest possible circulation throughout our country. I was glad to see the first-class letters that have been written you by such good Americans as Oscar Straus, Garrett P. Serviss, Rear Admiral W.W. Kimball, C.P. Gray, Holman Day, and the others. On the other hand, I was saddened by the extraordinary letter sent you by the three young men who purported to speak for the senior class of the college of which they are members. The course of conduct which these men and those like them advocate for the nation would, of course, not only mean a peculiar craven avoidance of national duty by our people at this time, but would also inevitably tend permanently to encourage the spirit of individual cowardice no less than of national cowardice.