ARTICLE XVII The present treaty shall be ratified by the President of the United States, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate thereof, and by Her Majesty the Queen Regent of Spain; and the ratifications shall be exchanged at Washington within six months from the date hereof, or earlier if possible. In faith whereof, we, the respective Plenipotentiaries, have signed this treaty and have hereunto affixed our seals. Done in duplicate at Paris, the tenth day of December in the year of Our Lord one thousand eight hundred and ninety eight. [SEAL] WILLIAM R. DAY [SEAL] CUSHMAN K. DAVIS [SEAL] WILLIAM P. FRYE *[SEAL] GEORGE GRAY [SEAL] WHITELAW REID [SEAL] EUGENIO MONTERO RIOS [SEAL] B. DE ABARZUZA [SEAL] J. DE GARNICA [SEAL] W. R. DE VILLA-URRUTIA [SEAL] RAFAEL CERERO THE AMERICAN SOLDIER ADDRESS BY THE SECRETARY OF WAR AT THE MARQUETTE CLUB IN CHICAGO, OCTOBER 7, 1899, IN RESPONSE TO THE TOAST, "THE AMERICAN SOLDIER" AM not unmindful of the fact that the easiest way to be interesting is to be indiscreet, and that the most attractive aids to oratory are extravagant expressions which, while conforming to the heat of the evening, do not commend themselves to the sober judgment of the morning. Happily, the subject to which I am assigned tonight finds its own interest in every American heart, and no eloquence is needed to strike the chords of sympathy or of sentiment in loyal souls, where the American soldier is the theme. You do not wish me to speak of the soldier of the past. We are a peaceful, not a military people, but we are made of fighting fiber, and whenever fighting is by hard necessity the business of the hour we always do it as becomes the children of great, warlike races; and on every field from the day when along the stone walls that line the Cambridge road, the men of Concord and of Acton made each his own disappearing gun carriage, to the day when the flag floated over the citadel of Manila, the American soldier has answered loyally to every call of duty. It is the soldier of today of whom you wish me to speak and of whom I wish to speak. The American soldier today is a part of a great machine which we call military organization; a machine in which, as by electrical converters, the policy of government is transformed into the strategy of the general, into the tactics of the field and into the action of the man behind the gun. Through that machine he is fed, clothed, transported and armed, equipped and housed. The machine today is defective; it needs improvement; it ought to be improved. Thirty-three years of profound peace have evolved in it some men upon whom the stress of harsh requirement has proved that they are unfit for the positions to which they have attained. Some square pegs have got into round holes and some round pegs have got into square holes. Some men who, in the ordinary days of peace, have seemed to be equal to all requirements, in the stern necessities of war have failed to answer to the demands; and whereever that has occurred the machinery has stopped and failed to accomplish its purpose. This was inevitable. It could be avoided only by the true Anglo-Saxon method of improvement by experiment. The machine was the machine by which was fought, through which were clothed and armed, equipped, transported and ordered, the armies which fought, the greatest civil war of modern times. It was the machinery that we received through that great generation of men whom we all honor as we look back over a third of a century, and it has required the experience of another war to teach the American people where it needs improvement and change. It rests with you, through the senators and representatives in Congress whom you shall elect, to determine whether the lesson of this later war shall be learned, and the army organization of America shall be put in the front of American progress; but in the meantime let me say to you that within the limits of that great army machinery there are today in the city of Washington and in every military department, scores, hundreds of men doing faithful, devoted, and able service in the cause of their country and of their country's army, of whom any people upon the face of this earth might well be proud. When the history of these troublous years comes to be written with cold and unimpassioned pen, the names of many |