a
policy, to the successful maintenance of which will be needed, not
only lofty political conceptions of right and of honor, but also the
power to support, and if need be to enforce, the course of action
which such conceptions shall from time to time demand. Such
maintenance will depend primarily upon the navy, but not upon it
alone; there will be needed besides an adequate and extremely mobile
army, and an efficient correlation of the one with the other, based
upon an accurate conception of their respective functions. The true
corrective to the natural tendency of each to exaggerate its own
importance to the common end is to be found only in some general
understanding of the subject diffused throughout the body of the
people, who are the ultimate arbiters of national policy.

In short, the people of the United States will need to understand, not
only what righteousness dictates, but what power, military and naval,
requires, in order duly to assert itself. The disappointment and
impatience, now being manifested in too many quarters, over the
inevitable protraction of the military situation in the Philippines,
indicates a lack of such understanding; for, did it exist, men would
not need to be told that even out of the best material, of which we
have an abundance, a soldier is not made in a day, nor an army in a
season; that when these, the necessary tools, are wanting, or are
insufficient in number, the work cannot but lag until they are
supplied; in short, that in war, as in every calling, he who wills the
end must also understand and will the means. It was the same with the
wide-spread panic that swept along our seaboard at the beginning of
the late war. So far as it was excusable, it was due to the want of
previous preparation; so far as it was unreasonable, it was due to
ignorance; but both the want of preparation and the ignorance were the
result of the preceding general indifference of the nation to military
and naval affairs, an indifference which necessarily had found its
reflection in the halting and inadequate provisions made by Congress.

Although changes and additions have been introduced where it has
seemed expedient, the author has decided to allow these articles to
stand, in the main, substantially as written immediately after the
close of hostilities. The opening paragraphs, while less applicable,
in their immediate purport, to the present moment, are nevertheless
not inappropriate as an explanation of