WEST POINT ADDRESS AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION OF THE From the outbreak of the war of the Revolution, the necessity for trained engineers and artillerists was evident. The want was supplied, as far as possible, by inviting foreigners to assist in the military operations. General Henry Knox, Chief of Artillery, was the first to propose the establishment of a military academy, where cadets would be educated, chiefly in the theory of war, leaving the practice to be gained in actual service. In a report to a committee of Congress dated September 27, 1776, he advocated an academy "nearly on the same plan as that of Woolwich.” General Knox's views were supported by Alexander Hamilton and approved by General Washington, but the plan was not carried out until 1802, when the United States Military Academy was established at West Point. In the first century of its existence, West Point graduated 4,121 cadets, and these officers have formed the backbone and the directing force of the regular and volunteer armies of the United States; and they furnished both the North and the South with their leading officers in the war between the states. Dr. Edward S. Holden, Librarian of the Academy, states that "every great battle of the Civil War except two was fought under the command of a graduate" of West Point. Mr. Root delivered an address at the Centennial Celebration of the founding of West Point. He made the following reference to the anniversary in his report as Secretary of War for 1902: The Military Academy at West Point on June 11, 1902, celebrated with appropriate ceremonies the completion of a hundred years of honorable and useful service. The advance of the world in military science, the increasing complexity of the machinery and material used in warfare, and the difficulty of the problems involved in transporting, supplying, and handling the great armies of modern times, make such an institution even more necessary to the country now than when it was founded by the fathers of the Republic a hundred years ago. The efficiency of the institution and the high standard of honor and devotion to duty which have characterized its graduates justify the continuance of public confidence. The wise liberality of Congress has enabled the institution to begin its second century with the well-founded hope of larger and long-continued usefulness, E VERY soldier here would more readily charge a battery than I undertake to follow the eloquence, humor and pathos of Horace Porter. Fortunately, but few and brief should be the words which close this cheerful and interesting occasion. The centennial year of the Military Academy fittingly coincides with the beginning of an era of great opportunity and greater obligation. One hundred years ago the people of the United States, few as they were, were scattered in rural communities, the Indian and the game were near every door, and by every door hung the rifle, the powder-horn and the bullet mould. The men of Lexington and Concord had little training, but every man knew how to shoot. Life was closer to the simplicities of living, and every man knew how to take care of himself out of doors, to feed himself, to clothe himself under the simple and the hard conditions of warfare. Armies were small; the opportunities for supply were proportionately great. But now, with the increase of our population, the collection of a large proportion of our people in the great cities, with the disappearance of game, with the increasing luxuries and refinements of life, the volunteer armies upon which the Republic must in the main depend to fight its wars, will be made up for the most part of men who have never fired a gun. Armies are large and the problems of supply, of transportation, have become complicated and difficult, requiring the best art of the best-trained minds. The increase in the scientific qualities of attack and 1 General Porter, to whom Mr. Root refers, is the Honorable Horace Porter, graduate of West Point of the class of 1860. During the Civil War, General Porter served in the Federal army, and during the latter part of the war he was on General Grant's staff and for his services was brevetted Brigadier-General, United States Army. After the war he served as private secretary to President Grant. From 1897 to 1905 he was American Ambassador to France and in 1907 a delegate on the part of the United States to the Second Hague Peace Conference. General Porter, while Ambassador, discovered the burial place of John Paul Jones in Paris, and through his exertions the body of John Paul Jones was transported to the United States, where it lies appropriately buried in Annapolis. defense, and the changes in the weapons of destruction, have made it impossible that the man should come from the counter and the plow and the workshop, and be familiar with the tools which he has to use as a soldier. And now, at the very time that this great institution of military instruction is rounding out its first century of existence, the attention of our people has been sharply concentrated upon this increased necessity for military training and military science by the events of the past few years; and the conclusion which has been reached finds expression in the action of the national legislature, which, through long discussion, but with absolute certainty, reaches just conclusions in the end upon all great subjects of public importance. The conclusion that the country needs the Military Academy more at the beginning of the second century of its existence than it did at the beginning of the first, is expressed by the laws of Congress which have enlarged the number of your corps, and which are just now devoting to the enlargement of the accommodations of the Academy the munificent sum of two million dollars, to be immediately expended, with an authorized ultimate expenditure of five millions and a half. How well you will be able to meet the obligation and to justify this confidence, let the record of the American army of today answer. For our army of America, small as it was, and far across the sea, within a few weeks of active military operation captured the fortified city of Santiago, took prisoners an army greater in number than itself, and ended in a single short campaign the conflict with the power which once controlled almost the whole of the western world. Having accomplished that feat, the army gave to the island of Cuba what it had won; it released the imprisoned; it healed the sick; it cleaned the jails; it opened hospitals and asylums; it dotted the country from end to end with schools; it gathered the children from the fields and forests and towns, and set them in rows of bright and interested faces, with schoolbooks before them; it extirpated disease and saved more lives than were lost in all the war; it established the most wonderful school of government ever known, and for three years has been teaching Cuban people how to govern themselves; and last, it has come away leaving a free and happy and grateful people. Its clear-sighted courage made straight the way from the sea to Peking, and after the capture of the imperial city and the rescue of the beleaguered legations, in the space of a few short weeks the district of the city controlled by the American army was found crowded with the people who had returned to their customary vocations under the protection of wise and just soldiers, who fought and who carried the blessings of peace and justice, as they fought, under the Stars and Stripes. In the Philippines, that great stretch of country extending for more than a thousand miles from north to south, the army has put down an insurrection of seven millions of people, so that today peace reigns from the northernmost point of Luzon to the southernmost island of the Sulu Archipelago. And with the sword it has carried the schoolbook, the blessings of peace and self-government and individual liberty; and now in little more than three years after the great struggle began in February, 1899, nine-tenths of all the men who took part in the insurgent government are engaged in sustaining or carrying on the government of the Philippines, under the protection of American liberty. Our soldiers have been criticised, and some of them have been accused; but however ready men at ease here may be to believe, to repeat, to rejoice in accusations against our brethren who are fighting under the American flag in support of American sovereignty, away upon the other side of the world, let me tell you that the President and the Secretary of War, and the officers, the public officers of our government at Washington, have followed these soldiers of ours in report and in private letters and in telegraphic dispatches, and by the oral word of those who have returned, during their whole course of conflict; have seen them there often bare-footed, tramping through the jungle; have seen them one by one dropping off, murdered by the treacherous foe; have seen them fading from disease; have seen them falling by shot and by sword; have seen them courageous, patient, enduring, magnanimous, faithful, loyal always to the highest standard of American citizenship, and we give you our word that these men shall not be condemned unheard by the public officers of the United States, charged to do justice to them. Be of good cheer, American soldiers! When the record comes to be made up in the cool judgment of the American people and of mankind; after Cuba, with its brilliant page, after China, with its glorious achievement, will be written another page equally brilliant, equally glorious, on which will be recorded the achievements in war and in peace of the American army in the Philippines. All honor to the volunteers who have been and who must always be the main support of our country in war. All honor to the genius, the courage, the self-sacrifice of the men, many of whom I see before me now, who have won immortal renown as generals of the volunteer army. They will be the first to say aye when I declare that the formative power, the high standard of conduct, the informing spirit of every American army is to be found in the regular army of the United States. All honor to the officers of the regular army, who in true republican fashion have worked their way up from the ranks, as did Chaffee, commanding in the Philippines. And all honor to the officers who, turning aside from the allurements of wealth and honor in civil life, have been appointed to the army as civilians, accepting the slender income and the |