I again commend to Congress the giving of legislative sanction to the appointment of the naval aids to the Secretary of the Navy.  These aids and the council of aids appointed by the Secretary of the Navy to assist him in the conduct of his department have proven to be of the highest utility.  They have furnished an executive committee of the most skilled naval experts, who have coordinated the action of the various bureaus in the Navy, and by their advice have enabled the Secretary to give an administration at the same time economical and most efficient.  Never before has the United States had a Navy that compared in efficiency with its present one, but never before have the requirements with respect to naval warfare been higher and more exacting than now.  A year ago Congress refused to appropriate for more than one battleship.  In this I think a great mistake of policy was made, and I urgently recommend that this Congress make up for the mistake of the last session by appropriations authorizing the construction of three battleships, in addition to destroyers, fuel ships, and the other auxiliary vessels as shown in the building program of the general board.  We are confronted by a condition in respect to the navies of the world which requires us, if we would maintain our Navy as an insurance of peace, to augment our naval force by at least two battleships a year and by battle cruisers, gunboats, torpedo destroyers, and submarine boats in a proper proportion.  We have no desire for war.  We would go as far as any nation in the world to avoid war, but we are a world power.  Our population, our wealth, our definite policies, our responsibilities in the Pacific and the Atlantic, our defense of the Panama Canal, together with our enormous world trade and our missionary outposts on the frontiers of civilization, require us to recognize our position as one of the foremost in the family of nations, and to clothe ourselves with sufficient naval power to give force to our reasonable demands, and to give weight to our influence in those directions of progress that a powerful Christian nation should advocate.

I observe that the Secretary of the Navy devotes some space to a change in the disciplinary system in vogue in that branch of the service.  I think there is nothing quite so unsatisfactory to either the Army or the Navy as the severe punishments necessarily inflicted by court-martial for desertions and purely military offenses, and I am glad to hear that the British have solved this important and difficult matter in a satisfactory way.  I commend to the consideration of Congress the details of the new disciplinary system, and recommend that laws be passed putting the same into force both in the Army and the Navy.

I invite the attention of Congress to that part of the report of the Secretary of the Navy in which he recommends the formation of a naval reserve by the organization of the ex-sailors of the Navy.

I repeat my recommendation made last year that proper provision should be made for the rank of the commander in chief of the squadrons and fleets of the Navy.  The inconvenience attending the necessary precedence that most foreign admirals have over our own whenever they meet in official functions ought to be avoided.  It impairs the prestige of our Navy and is a defect that can be very easily removed.