Now a word for the Army. I was very sorry that this year Congress did not provide the means for having field manœuvres such as those General Grant and General Bell took part in last year. Those manœuvres are very useful. It is impossible to take National Guard regiments and put them into such manœuvres without causing them great discomfort, and it may be better to keep such manœuvres as were carried on last year for the Regular Army. But it is a great mistake not to continue them for the Regular Army. We have a small Regular Army. It is not advisable or necessary that we should have a large one. It is advisable, it is necessary, that the Army we have should be efficient as a whole as well as efficient in its individual parts. I firmly believe that given an equal chance, the officers and enlisted men of the American Army offer material quite as good as any to be found in any army of the world. Because I believe that I think it not merely an iniquity but a crime not to give the officers and the enlisted men that equal chance. We have an Army now short of seventy thousand men. Deducting the men necessary for the manning of the coast defences, it would give us at the very outside figure a possible Army of fifty thousand men—that is, an Army about one-fourteenth the size of the forces that have been contending in the mighty death wrestle around Mukden. Surely we owe it to this Nation that we should have that Army of fifty thousand men able to manœuvre as an Army of fifty thousand men and able to render as good service as such as any army can render. We can never achieve that ideal unless we are willing as a Nation to spend the money so that the Army shall have the chance of being handled in time of peace in great masses by the men who will handle it in masses in time of war. If when war comes you set thirty thousand men, of whom no more than five or six hundred have ever served together, under officers who have never handled, any of them, more than five or six hundred men, you can not expect anything but disaster; unless perchance you go against a foe even more foolish than you are. So I ask you of this society, the Sons of the American Revolution, to study the war of the Revolution, to study the War of 1812, to study the war with Mexico, and the Civil War, not only from the standpoint of the victories, but from the standpoint of the defeats, and to try to see to it that in our policy at the present time we carry out the old policies that won the victories, and avoid the old policies that brought about the defeats. I speak in the interest of peace when I ask for an efficient Army and Navy. This is a high-spirited people. This is a people that will not abandon the Monroe Doctrine, will not stop building the Isthmian Canal, will not surrender its hold upon the islands of the sea. Very good; then take such steps as are necessary to make your hold on those possessions, your backing of this doctrine, effective, and not empty bluster.