Our attitude in Cuba is a sufficient guaranty of our own good faith.  We have not the slightest desire to secure any territory at the expense of any of our neighbors.  We wish to work with them hand in hand, so that all of us may be uplifted together, and we rejoice over the good fortune of any of them, we gladly hail their material prosperity and political stability, and are concerned and alarmed if any of them fall into industrial or political chaos.  We do not wish to see any Old World military power grow up on this continent, or to be compelled to become a military power ourselves.  The peoples of the Americas can prosper best if left to work out their own salvation in their own way.

The work of upbuilding the Navy must be steadily continued.  No one point of our policy, foreign or domestic, is more important than this to the honor and material welfare, and above all to the peace, of our nation in the future.  Whether we desire it or not, we must henceforth recognize that we have international duties no less than international rights.  Even if our flag were hauled down in the Philippines and Puerto Rico, even if we decided not to build the Isthmian Canal, we should need a thoroughly trained Navy of adequate size, or else be prepared definitely and for all time to abandon the idea that our nation is among those whose sons go down to the sea in ships.  Unless our commerce is always to be carried in foreign bottoms, we must have war craft to protect it.

Inasmuch, however, as the American people have no thought of abandoning the path upon which they have entered, and especially in view of the fact that the building of the Isthmian Canal is fast becoming one of the matters which the whole people are united in demanding, it is imperative that our Navy should be put and kept in the highest state of efficiency, and should be made to answer to our growing needs.  So far from being in any way a provocation to war, an adequate and highly trained navy is the best guaranty against war, the cheapest and most effective peace insurance.  The cost of building and maintaining such a navy represents the very lightest premium for insuring peace which this nation can possibly pay.

Probably no other great nation in the world is so anxious for peace as we are.  There is not a single civilized power which has anything whatever to fear from aggressiveness on our part.  All we want is peace; and toward this end we wish to be able to secure the same respect for our rights from others which we are eager and anxious to extend to their rights in return, to insure fair treatment to us commercially, and to guarantee the safety of the American people.

Our people intend to abide by the Monroe Doctrine and to insist upon it as the one sure means of securing the peace of the Western Hemisphere.  The Navy offers us the only means of making our insistence upon the Monroe Doctrine anything but a subject of derision to whatever nation chooses to disregard it.  We desire the peace which comes as of right to the just man armed; not the peace granted on terms of ignominy to the craven and the weakling.