We won at Manila because the shipbuilders of the country, including those here at San Francisco, under the wise provisions of Congress, had for fifteen years before been preparing the navy.

I am deeply touched by the beautiful gift you have given me.

I trust I came within them a fairly good American, and I leave them a better American.

For that reason I hail with especial pleasure the existence of such societies as those which seek to band together the young men and young women native born to this State.

I want to thank you and my comrades of the Spanish-American War from my heart;

It is not too much to say that no man since Lincoln was as widely and as universally beloved in this country as was President McKinley.

I have never tasted, not even at the wonderful banquet that I have attended in San Francisco, anything quite so good.

Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory…

I thank you for coming here and for giving me the privilege of joining with you today in these solemn ceremonies of commemoration.

This is a government of freemen

I believe in children

I should be sorry indeed if there were not societies like those of the Native Sons and Native Daughters in this State to keep alive the sense of historic continuity with the State's mighty past.

I most earnestly hope that this work will ever be of a peaceful character

Let us speak courteously, deal fairly, and keep ourselves armed and ready.

I think it is getting to be fairly understood that that is our foreign policy.

Proud of your State? Of course you are proud of your State.

None of the men of my own generation or of this younger, stand as close to me as you of my regiment, as the men of the Spanish War do,

When 1898 came and the war which President McKinley in all honesty and in all sincerity sought to avoid became inevitable, and was pressed upon him, he met it as he and you had met the crisis of 1861.