of important policies the country has, on the whole, fared worse at the hands of those whose thinking was deficient than at the hands of those whose morals were crooked. High-minded sentimentalists have inflicted more injury in the advocacy of unwise measures than came from the treason of Arnold or the moral obliquity of Burr. In our own day the Democratic party-and incidentally the country has been quite as much demoralized by the loose thinking of the moral Mr. Bryan as by the loose money of the unmoral Mr. Hearst.

On the other hand, when we note the names of those political leaders whose figures grow larger as the years pass, we recognize that these are the men who combined moral purpose with the ability to think straight. The names of Washington, Franklin, Marshall, Lincoln, grow brighter because the years have decided that the measures for which they stood were fundamentally sound. Wise enough to lay aside the emotion of the day and of the hour, these men thought straight, and their mistakes were correspondingly few.

And it is to be noted that there is a vast difference between intellectual cleverness and the ability to think straight. Many men there were in the group of Revolutionary worthies who were more brilliant men than Washington, but there were none who had in fuller measure that homely quality of common sense which took up a question impartially and impersonally and got the right answer.

No man's place in history and no man's work as the executive of a great nation is to be judged fairly at such close range as that in which we stand to President Roosevelt and his work. Whether his political leadership will be held to rest upon sound thinking as well as upon high civic ideals the wise years, as Lowell calls them, can alone decide.

This much at least may be said. His countrymen, with practical unanimity, believe in his seriousness of purpose and the genuineness of his political ideals. The man's life speaks for these things.

Mr. Roosevelt's weight as a thinker is not so universally conceded. Certain temperamental qualities have conspired to betray him into a number of personal

controversies. In these encounters he has not always succeeded in setting forth that even-handed picture of justice which he so admirably preaches, nor that discriminating sense of humor which is a saving grace in a statesman. His friends-I count myself one-appreciate the fact that these affairs have served to lend color to the charge that the President is a man of emotions, not a thinker.

Nevertheless, he who seeks to measure President Roosevelt fairly will not allow the incongruities of his personal relations to blind him to the man's larger work. Most Presidents are overwhelmed in the current of routine and of political commonplace. No President since Lincoln's day has so resolutely as Mr. Roosevelt brushed aside the day-by-day political problems to grapple with those larger questions of public policy and National morality which every President meets but few have the courage to face. It is in dealing with such questions that the President has done his best work, and in this he has shown not only moral courage but thinking ability and political sense of a high order. The proportion of Americans who think seriously on public questions has grown steadily since the campaign of education in 1896. The great majority of such men to-day are ready to follow the President because they believe not only in his courage but in his intellectual leadership. Any measure of large public importance, such as this question of the maintenance of a strong navy, which Theodore Roosevelt commends to his countrymen, deserves at their hands the most earnest consideration.

Is this contention of the President justified upon the firm ground of good morals and of efficient thinking? Or, putting it in another way, leaving out local and temporary excitements, shutting out of our ears the talk of the sensational press concerning Japan, is the doctrine of a strong navy for the United States justified upon those larger underlying principles which take into account our racial history, the progress of civilization, and our universal human nature?

The practical and immediate arguments both in favor of and against the plan of a strong navy have been so

often discussed in late years that I do not wish to rehearse them here. I venture, however, to call attention to certain fundamental considerations which arise out of the very process of our civilization, and which are, by reason of their universality, almost always overlooked. The influences which tend to make war or to prevent it are all contained in that slow process of evolution which has resulted in what we call to-day civilization. Those influences are to be the determining ones in the progress of the future, though their operation may be concealed by events of the day and of the hour. We reckon most surely when we do not forget them and when we seek to deal through them, even if their process is slower than our desires.

The part which fighting has played in the evolution of human beings is one whose story has never been fully told. We know that our race has been evolved through thousands of years during which the principal business of men was to fight. In truth, only a few centuries have elapsed an insignificant time in the history of a race-since fighting was the principal business of even the most civilized nations.

The process by which individuals and nations have been gradually brought out of this state of incessant war into one of comparative peace has been the process of slow education. Aboriginal man led an isolated life, his hand against every man and every man's hand against him. Gradually the social instinct developed. Family and community life began, and out of this slow process there has grown a civilization under which war between individuals has been practically stopped in modern nations, and war between nations has become rare. The factors which have entered into this education are numerous. They rest partly on social, partly on commercial, partly on intellectual and religious grounds, but whatever that process may be and whatever may have been the factors most prominent in it, the civilization which we see to-day is the result of an education of men out of a state of warfare so recent that their fighting instincts have undergone no great change.

To see that this is true needs only the

briefest examination of civilized man as he stands to-day in his social, political, and international relations. The highest type of man that civilization has produced is still a fighter, and will, under provocation, throw his life away as fearlessly and as recklessly as the primeval man in his day-by-day conflicts. The difference is that the civilized man of to-day holds his fighting nature under the discipline of the law, of social custom, and of religious training. We have reached that stage in the social order in which civilized man agrees that his individual quarrels shall be settled by a tribunal charged with that duty. When he oversteps this convention, the law has the power to punish his transgression. The result is the disarmament of the individual.

Unfortunately, many of the causes which make for individual submission to the law are absent in the case of nations.

In the case of disagreement between individuals the courts not only decide as to the justice of the conflicting claims, but they have the power to enforce their decision. Back of the judge stands the policeman. If the court lacked the power to enforce its judgment, it would not be long before individuals would refuse to submit their causes to its adjudication. On the other hand, there is no international police, and the difficulty of creating one is enormous. The time may come when, by the evolution of our national relations, this may be possible, but that time is so far distant that it has small relation to the problem which we are considering.

Again, one who looks clear-eyed at this question cannot afford to leave out of account the essential selfishness of international action. Of all the Revolutionary leaders, George Washington was perhaps the man who had the clearest head. Looking back over his political life, it may probably be said with truth that the measures which he advocated have, on the whole, turned out to be more nearly right than those of any other leader, and that, on the other hand, he advocated fewer things which turned out to be mistakes.

In his Farewell Address, which will

remain to the end of our National life one of its most remarkable state papers, he referred to the aspect of international relations to which I have just alluded. After deprecating alike passionate antipathies and passionate attachments between nations, he says: ""Tis folly in one nation to look for disinterested favors from another. . . . There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. "Tis an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard."

Considered from the standpoint of sentiment, these words seem to have the ring of thorough pessimism; considered from the standpoint of a closer study of human relations, they carry a most significant truth. That truth is this: The representatives of a nation stand in the position of trustees. They feel themselves the defenders and conservers of the nation's rights. Standing in this attitude, they are uncompromising in their demands. As private individuals they might be willing to settle by this compromise or that, but when they hold in trust the rights or interests of a nation their very responsibility as trustees makes them exacting and uncompromising. Between two such bodies there is small chance of agreement.

Exactly the same process may be seen in our own country in the history of corporations and in the attitude of the public toward them. As long as business was conducted between individuais, it rarely happened that the full power of the law was invoked in settlement of a dispute. A higher law which took into. consideration mercy as well as justice, the needs of the debtor as well as the rights of the lender, was allowed to enter. Public opinion condemned the private citizen who pressed his legal right beyond a certain point.

On the other hand, the representatives of a corporation-and on the average these representatives are men of high character-exact as officers of trust the letter of the law. Compromises which as individuals they would gladly make, they feel themselves estopped from making by their duty as officers. Much of the unpopularity of corporate as com

pared with individual dealing comes from the fact that the officers of corporations stand in a legal relation to the men with whom they deal of such a kind that they demand the letter of the law. A corporate soul has not yet been developed, nor yet an international conscience. Perhaps both may come in time.

These considerations seem to me fundamental. They have to do not with our time alone, but with generations yet unborn. The forces which are operating in the social, political, and commercial education of the races are likely to continue for an indefinite period. The whole process of civilization and of education which has gone on in the thousands of years whose history we know is likely to go on for some thousands of years in the future.

If this is true, it seems clear that for generations to come wars of greater or less frequency may be confidently expected. Except in the hopes of the most enthusiastic peace advocates, it does not seem likely that the conventions established between nations are likely to do more in the near future than to make war less probable, and, if it does come, less bloody. Our individual human nature or our international human nature is not likely to be made over again in a generation or in a century. The time is sure to come when this Nation will have to say that it will or it will not fight.

If this is true, is it, on the whole, wise for one of the great nations to adopt a policy of preparedness or of unpreparedness, and which of these two policies is the more likely to invite war?

If the general conditions which I have attempted to sketch represent the social order to-day, then these questions are practically answered by the statement of the conditions themselves. If, sooner or later, a great nation must face the question of war, then preparedness is a national duty, and unpreparedness is to invite war, an invitation all the more likely to be accepted in proportion as a nation is commercially aggressive, confident, and careless of the sensibilities of other nations.

There is another fact in this connection to be taken into account. It is

this: The people of these United States are a peaceful people, and to-day they are giving themselves perhaps too heartily to the game of business. They know almost nothing about military life. As a nation they take only the vaguest interest in the two branches of the military service. Many good people even decry and belittle a life in these services. Notwithstanding all this, the people of the United States come of a race of fighters. There is just one thing which might change their present attitude to war and turn them from a life of commerce into a life of militarism. This would be to receive a sound thrashing by some foreign power. Let this happen and there would be no dearth of appropriations for ships. The cost of our military establishment would come up by leaps and bounds, and this people would give itself as heartily to the business of war as it does to-day to the business of peace. Those who talk glibly of what might follow a Japanese victory and a war between America and Japan ought to be absolutely impossible-do not go below the surface. Such a victory might mean the inauguration of a halfcentury of racial war such as the world has not known since the days when Roman civilization went down under the Eastern invasion.

Outside the matter of expense, the argument most commonly urged against the development of a strong navy is the plea that such a naval power would furnish opportunity to an aggressive President to involve the Nation in war.

There is little in the history of our own country or of contemporary nations to support this fear. Since England became supreme on the sea, she has had no war with a great Power. And in our own history, what President has ever by his aggressions brought the Nation to war? Our wars came by other means than the aggressiveness of the executive. Those who were in Washington in any governmental relation during the stirring days of 1898 cannot forget the forces that then made for war, and the resistance of the chief executive to the war spirit.

It is not a President, charged with the burden and the responsibility, who is

likely to push the United States into war; it is rather the other less responsi ble agencies which influence our social and political being-a sensation-seeking press, emotional politicians, clashing commercial interests, inflamed public sentiment, and, underneath all, influencing all, the universal human liking for a fight. None of these, when aroused, stop to inquire if the Nation is ready. They demand war first, and think afterward.

When one weighs fairly the fundamental influences which still operate in our social order, and considers at the same time the influences, uncontrolled by the Executive, which may make for war, he will, in my judgment, conclude that Theodore Roosevelt, in advocating the policy of a strong navy, sets forth a sound doctrine, and one which looks no less to the preservation of peace than to the upholding of our dignity and integrity as a Nation. The difference in view-point between those who oppose and those who favor the maintenance of a strong navy lies, not in the end sought to be accomplished, but in the process by which this end is to be gained. From the one point of view, this end is to be wrought by specific conventions which shall quickly do away with armies and navies. From the other view-point, the way to National disarmament lies along the same path we have already traveled. Those who advocate the latter method mistrust the value of any short cut to international peace which runs ahead of the education of the age.

If I understand the philosophy which underlies the teachings of Jesus Christ, it pointed to exactly this treatment of all such questions. In his day the evils of intemperance were as manifest as they are to-day; the abuses of human slavery affected the entire body politic; the social order was at the mercy of the military power, and his own people groaned under its burdens. And yet he preached temperance, not total abstinence; he urged master and slave alike to carry out their duties to each other honorably and faithfully, but he made no crusade against the institution of slavery; he taught the soldier to lead the soldier's life in mercy and in justice,

but he made no effort to abolish militarism. Since his day we have made progress in just such proportion as we have followed this method. The profound wisdom of this philosophy can be realized only as one studies the failures which have resulted when any human organization has sought to substitute for it its own moral and religious specifics. Men who admit the facts of racial history and of human progress to which attention was first called, and who accept as well the philosophy of life to which I have just alluded, believe that the next step forward in civilization does not lie in the abolition of armies and navies, but in the making of these necessary organizations training-schools of the highest professional proficiency, but training-schools at the same time in national self-restraint, national justice, national respect for law and order and for the rights of others. They believe that in proportion as a nation gives itself generously, unselfishly, patriotically to the training of an army and a navy in this spirit, it helps in the most practical and direct way to prepare the world for a civilization under which armies and navies shall be international police and the preservers of international peace.

If this position is right, then the question of efficiency in the naval service is a true national question, and one more far-reaching in its effects than we generally realize, for it is a question, not only of naval efficiency, but of national efficiency as well.

A nation cannot create and maintain a naval service of high order by merely handing out a large sum of money. Lowell was right when he said that the true giver is he who gives himself with his gift. The principle is true of nations as well as of individuals. If the United States is to maintain such a service upon a high plane of efficiency, there must be put into its making not only money, but thought. We must give to it not alone appropriations for battle-ships, but sympathetic interest and intelligent supervision.

The real efficiency of the naval service and its potential energy are measured by the efficiency of the officers who make up the service.

How are these officers trained? Is their education thorough, well rounded, and wisely adapted to develop the qualities called for in the widely varying branches of the service, or is that education superficial and one-sided? Are the spirit and morale of the service subject to intelligent examination? Are those in the service able to use the equipment which the Nation supplies to its full capacity?

These are fundamental questions if our navy is to be efficient, but they are questions with which neither the country nor Congress and rarely a President is really concerned. It is true that Congress appoints a board of visitors to inspect. the Naval Academy each year, but there is no more solemn farce enacted by the Government than the proceedings of this board of visitors. It is composed partly of Senators and Representatives, partly of estimable men generally chosen by reason of some personal acquaintance with high officials of the Government. The board visits Annapolis after all the work of the year is completed, and is shown a series of exercises and entertainments which occupies every hour of its stay. At the end of all this it writes a report which is carefully pigeonholedon the whole, probably the best use to which it could be put.

The responsibility for the right kind of questioning must in the end rest on the President, the Secretary of the Navy, and the naval officers themselves. In the past there has been little of it. It is, in fact, not easy to secure that sort of study of a specialized service which leads to the recognition of the weak places and their betterment. No service

like that of the navy can be judged with entire fairness wholly from the standpoint of the outsider. On the other hand, no such service can secure its highest efficiency if left to develop solely from the influences which lie within its own lines.

The ideals of the naval service and the qualities of the men who make that service efficient or inefficient are determined in large measure by the character of the training received at Annapolis. Congress has supplied the money for most complete buildings and equipment