But the great fact that war was coming--war, the test-- delighted him, and his sense of humor was not allowed to sleep. For the peace-at-any-price folk, the denouncers of the Navy and the Army, the preachers of the doctrine that as all men are good it was wicked to build defenses as if we suspected the goodness of our neighbors, now rushed to the Government for protection. A certain lady of importance, who had a seaside villa, begged that a battleship should be anchored just outside of it. Seaboard cities frantically demanded that adequate protection should be sent to them. The spokesman for one of these cities happened to be a politician of such importance that President McKinley told the Assistant Secretary that his request must be granted. Accordingly, Roosevelt put one of the old monitors in commission, and had a tug tow it, at the imminent risk of its crew, to the harbor which it was to guard, and there the water-logged old craft stayed, to the relief of the inhabitants of the city and the self-satisfaction of the Congressman who was able to give them so shining a proof of his power with the Administration. Many frightened Bostonians transferred their securities to the bank vaults of Worcester, and they, too, clamored for naval watch and ward. Roosevelt must have been made unusually merry by such tidings from Boston, the city which he regarded as particularly prolific in "the men who formed the lunatic fringe in all reform movements." It did not astonish him that the financiers and the business men, who were amassing great fortunes in peace, should frown on war, which interrupted their fortune-making; but he laughed when he remembered what they and many other vague pacifists had been solemnly proclaiming. There was the Senator, for instance, who had denied that we needed a Navy, because, if the emergency came, he said, we could improvise one, and "build a battleship in every creek." There were also the spread eagle Americans, the swaggerers and braggarts, who amused themselves in tail-twisting and insulting other nations so long as they could do this with impunity; but now they were brought to book, and their fears magnified the possible danger they might run from the invasion of irate Spaniards. Their imagination pictured to them the poor old Spanish warship Viscaya, as having as great possibility for destruction as the entire British Fleet itself.