Presidential addresses and state papers, Volume 3 (of 7)

by Theodore Roosevelt

I spoke to you of the difficulties to be met with in getting the Navy built up. Among these difficulties is the fact that there are some very good people who, whenever you say that you want a good Navy, say that “this is a lamentable illustration of the jingo spirit, and that there is no reason why this country should ever have a war.” I know one excellent gentleman in Congress who said he preferred arbitration to battleships. So do I. But suppose the other man does not. I want to have the battleships as a provocative for arbitration so far as the other man is concerned.

We have now got our Navy up to a good point. We have built and are building forty armored ships. For a year or two, or two or three years, to come, what we need to do is to provide for the personnel of those ships, and to secure the very highest standard of efficiency in handling them, singly and in squadrons; above all, for handling the great guns. So much for the Navy.

Now a word for the Army. I was very sorry that this year Congress did not provide the means for having field manœuvres such as those General Grant and General Bell took part in last year. Those manœuvres are very useful. It is impossible to take National Guard regiments and put them into such manœuvres without causing them great discomfort, and it may be better to keep such manœuvres as were carried on last year for the Regular Army. But it is a great mistake not to continue them for the Regular Army. We have a small Regular Army. It is not advisable or necessary that we should have a large one. It is advisable, it is necessary, that the Army we have should be efficient as a whole as well as efficient in its individual parts. I firmly believe that given an equal chance, the officers and enlisted men of the American Army offer material quite as good as any to be found in any army of the world. Because I believe that I think it not merely an iniquity but a crime not to give the officers and the enlisted men that equal chance. We have an Army now short of seventy thousand men. Deducting the men necessary for the manning of the coast defences, it would give us at the very outside figure a possible Army of fifty thousand men—that is, an Army about one-fourteenth the size of the forces that have been contending in the mighty death wrestle around Mukden. Surely we owe it to this Nation that we should have that Army of fifty thousand men able to manœuvre as an Army of fifty thousand men and able to render as good service as such as any army can render. We can never achieve that ideal unless we are willing as a Nation to spend the money so that the Army shall have the chance of being handled in time of peace in great masses by the men who will handle it in masses in time of war. If when war comes you set thirty thousand men, of whom no more than five or six hundred have ever served together, under officers who have never handled, any of them, more than five or six hundred men, you can not expect anything but disaster; unless perchance you go against a foe even more foolish than you are.

So I ask you of this society, the Sons of the American Revolution, to study the war of the Revolution, to study the War of 1812, to study the war with Mexico, and the Civil War, not only from the standpoint of the victories, but from the standpoint of the defeats, and to try to see to it that in our policy at the present time we carry out the old policies that won the victories, and avoid the old policies that brought about the defeats.

I speak in the interest of peace when I ask for an efficient Army and Navy. This is a high-spirited people. This is a people that will not abandon the Monroe Doctrine, will not stop building the Isthmian Canal, will not surrender its hold upon the islands of the sea. Very good; then take such steps as are necessary to make your hold on those possessions, your backing of this doctrine, effective, and not empty bluster.

So it is in civic affairs. Study not only what Washington and Washington’s supporters did, but study what was done by those who brought the Continental Congress to absolute impotence. Study what was done by those who nearly undid the good work of Washington. Study what has been done in the past by the men who have made errors no less than by the men who have won triumphs, and profit alike by the study of the triumphs and by the study of the errors.

Talking among ourselves, man to man, each of us will admit to the other that there are things in our life that he does not like; but when one of us gets on his feet to address the rest he often seems to feel as if somehow he ought never to speak save in indiscriminate praise of all. The same man who will take an unwarrantably pessimistic view of all our governmental matters in private will feel obliged to speak in unwarrantable praise of all these matters in public. We ought to avoid ignorant praise as much as ignorant blame. It is only by making a correct diagnosis that we can find out how to treat any given disease. A good physician in making a diagnosis is not either an optimist or a pessimist. He wants to find out the facts; for to take either too dark or too rosy a view may be fatal to the patient. Just so in our body politic. Try to find out what the facts really are, try to find out what the good qualities, what the defects; what the good side is in any portion of our Government, what the defect is in any portion of our Government. State the truth; do not hysterically exaggerate what is good; do not hysterically exaggerate what is evil. Find out the facts; and then with your whole heart set to work to preserve and make better the good and to cut out and do away with the evil.

ADDRESS TO THE GRADUATES OF THE UNITED STATES NAVAL MEDICAL SCHOOL, WASHINGTON, D. C., MARCH 25, 1905

Ladies and Gentlemen; and especially the Members of the Graduating Class:

I am glad to have the chance of saying a word of greeting to you this morning. You represent two professions, for you are members of the great medical body and you are also officers of the Navy of the United States, and therefore you have a double standard of honor up to which to live. I think that all of us laymen, men and women, have a peculiar appreciation of what a doctor means; for I do not suppose there is one of us who does not feel that the family doctor stands in a position of close intimacy with each of us, in a position of obligation to him under which one is happy to rest to an extent hardly possible with any one else; and those of us, I think most of us, who are fortunate enough to have a family doctor who is a beloved and intimate friend, realize that there can be few closer ties of intimacy and affection in the world. And while, of course, even the greatest and best doctors can not assume that very intimate relation with more than a certain number of people (though it is to be said that more than any other man, the doctor does commonly assume such a relation to many people)—while it is impossible this relation in its closest form shall obtain between a doctor and more than a certain number of people, still with every patient with whom the doctor is thrown at all intimately he has this peculiar relation to a greater or less extent. The effect that the doctor has upon the body of the patient is in very many cases no greater than the effect that he has upon the patient’s mind. Each one of you here has resting upon him not only a great responsibility for the care of the body of the officer or enlisted man who will be under his supervision, but a care—which ought not to be too consciously shown, but which should be unconsciously felt—for the man’s spirit. The morale of the entire ship’s company, of the entire body of men with which you are to be thrown, will be sensibly affected by the way in which each of you does his duty.