and complicated mechanisms intrusted to their care.  The marksmanship of our men has so improved during the last five years that I deem it within bounds to say that the Navy is more than twice as efficient, ship for ship, as half a decade ago.  The Navy can only attain proper efficiency if enough officers and men are provided, and if these officers and men are given the chance (and required to take advantage of it) to stay continually at sea and to exercise the fleets singly and above all in squadron, the exercise to be of every kind and to include unceasing practise at the guns, conducted under conditions that will test marksmanship in time of war.

In both the Army and the Navy there is urgent need that everything possible should be done to maintain the highest standard for the personnel, alike as regards the officers and the enlisted men.  I do not believe that in any service there is a finer body of enlisted men and of junior officer than we have in both the Army and the Navy, including the Marine Corps.  All possible encouragement to the enlisted men should be given, in pay and otherwise, and everything practicable done to render the service attractive to men of the right type.  They should be held to the strictest discharge of their duty, and in them a spirit should be encouraged which demands not the mere performance of duty, but the performance of far more than duty, if it conduces to the honor and the interest of the American nation; and in return the amplest consideration should be theirs.

West Point and Annapolis already turn out excellent officers.  We do not need to have these schools made more scholastic.  On the contrary we should never lose sight of the fact that the aim of each school is to turn out a man who shall be above everything else a fighting man.  In the Army in particular it is not necessary that either the cavalry or infantry officer should have special mathematical ability.  Probably in both schools the best part of the education is the high standard of character and of professional morale which it confers.

But in both services there is urgent need for the establishment of a principle of selection which will eliminate men after a certain age if they can not be promoted from the subordinate ranks, and which will bring into the higher ranks fewer men, and these at an earlier age.  This principle of selection will be objected to by good men of mediocre capacity, who are fitted to do well while young in the lower positions, but who are not fitted to do well when at an advanced age they come into positions of command and of great responsibility.  But the desire of these men to be promoted to positions which they are not competent to fill should not weigh against the interest of the Navy and the country.  At present our men, especially in the Navy, are kept far too long in the junior grades, and then, at much too advanced an age, are put quickly through the senior grades, often not attaining to these senior grades until they are too old to be of real use in them; and if they are of real use, being put through them so quickly that little benefit to the Navy comes from their having been in them at all.