Admiral Coghlan lived through the period which saw the United States at the close of the Civil War, with Farragut and his fellows as our admirals, loom up as one of the great naval Powers of the earth, which then saw us about the year 1882 reduced to a condition of effective sea-strength when it would have been flattery to call us a fifth-rate Power, and which then saw the building up of our Navy until at present, taking into account the ships built and authorized, and, above all, taking into account the way those ships are handled, singly and in squadrons—taking into the account the ships, the armor, the guns, and, above all, the men in the conning towers, in the engine rooms and behind the guns—we rank as one of the big naval Powers of the earth. We rank as such, we occupy our present position and we are a power potent for peace because we deliberately faced the fact that we did not have a Navy worth anything in 1882. I take immense interest in the Navy, because the Navy is the arm upon which this country must most depend for holding its own and upholding its honor so far as our international relations are concerned. We had to educate our people slowly up to the need of a Navy. We began by building some cruisers. We then built two or three fast vessels called commerce destroyers. We had quite a time for several years in persuading excellent people of good intentions, but not entirely clear minds, that it was rather less immoral to destroy commerce than to take life in battleships. Then we had to go through the stage of meeting and by degrees overcoming the arguments of those other excellent people who said we must have fighting ships, but only for defence; that we must only have coast defence ships; that is, we must win the fight not by hitting, but by parrying. If we had carried out that theory, Admiral Coghlan and his fellow-captains under Dewey would have been cooped up in coast defence vessels in San Francisco, while the hostile ships rested unharmed in Manila. That is the theory of coast defence; and in that case the war would never have had any end. We won because by that time our people had at last awakened to the fact that in a navy you want the very best type of ship; and that of all foolish things, the most foolish is to hit soft. Do not hit at all if you can help it. Avoid trouble of every kind. Do not hit at all if you can help it, but never hit soft. When Dewey and the captains under him went into Manila Bay they went in in ships that had been built, not that year nor the year before. Some of them had been built as much as fifteen years before, twelve years, eight years; and the legislators who authorized the building of those ships, the men who built them, the captains who first took them out, the captains who trained the men aboard them, every man who did his part in bringing up the Navy to the standard of efficiency which it had reached in 1898 is justly entitled to his share