r Annapolis who will have stayed in the Army or Navy
finds a great war on, and therefore has the opportunity to rise high.
Under such circumstances, I think that the man of such training who has
actually left the Army or the Navy has even more chance of rising than
the man who has remained in it. Moreover, often a man can do as I did in
the Spanish War, even though not a West Pointer.

This last point raises the question about you going to West Point
or Annapolis and leaving the Army or Navy after you have served the
regulation four years (I think that is the number) after graduation from
the academy. Under this plan you would have an excellent education and
a grounding in discipline and, in some ways, a testing of your capacity
greater than I think you can get in any ordinary college. On the other
hand, except for the profession of an engineer, you would have had
nothing like special training, and you would be so ordered about, and
arranged for, that you would have less independence of character than
you could gain from them. You would have had fewer temptations; but
you would have had less chance to develop the qualities which overcome
temptations and show that a man has individual initiative. Supposing you
entered at seventeen, with the intention of following this course. The
result would be that at twenty-five you would leave the Army or Navy
without having gone through any law school or any special technical
school of any kind, and would start your life work three or four years
later than your schoolfellows of to-day, who go to work immediately
after leaving college. Of course, under such circumstances, you might
study law, for instance, during the four years after graduation; but my
own feeling is that a man does good work chiefly when he is in something
which he intends to make his permanent work, and in which he is deeply
interested. Moreover, there will always be the chance that the number of
officers in the Army or Navy will be deficient, and that you would have
to stay in the service instead of getting out when you wished.

I want you to think over all these matters very seriously. It would be a
great misfortune for you to start into the Army or Navy as a career, and
find that you had mistaken your desires and had gone in without really
weighing the matter.

You ought not to enter unless you feel genuinely drawn to the life as a
life-work. If so, go in; but not otherwise.

Mr. Loeb told me to-day that at 1