An infinity of excuses can always be found for non-action.

Ships take years to build, crews take years before they become thoroughly expert, while the officers not only have to pass their early youth in a course of special training, but can not possibly rise to supreme excellence in their…

The nation must make ready the tools and train the men to use them, but at the crisis a great triumph can be achieved only should some heroic man appear.

In the Santiago campaign the army was more than once uncomfortably near grave disaster, from which it was saved by the remarkable fighting qualities of its individual fractions, and, above all, by the incompetency of its foes.

To go against a well-organized, well-handled, well-led foreign foe under such conditions would inevitably have meant failure and humiliation.

The bureaus in Washington were absolutely enmeshed in red tape, and were held for the most part by elderly men, of fine records in the past, who were no longer fit to break through routine and to show the extraordinary energy, business…

As a matter of fact, the blame must rest in all such cases far less with them than with those responsible for the existence of the system.

These are the risks which must be taken, and the men who take them should be singled out for reward and for duty.

A man afraid to vary in times of emergency from the regulations laid down in time of peace would never even have got the coal with which to steam to Manila from Hong Kong the instant the crisis came.

All that he could do was to choose a good man, give him the largest possible liberty of action, and back him up in every way; and this Secretary Long did.

Nevertheless, when the chance does come, only the great man can see it instantly and use it aright.

An excellent test is afforded by the readiness which the man has shown to take responsibility in any emergency in the past.

A service will do well or ill at the outbreak of war very much in proportion to the way it has been prepared to meet the outbreak during the preceding months.

Therefore, when war threatens, preparations must be made in any event; for the evil of what proves to be the needless expenditure of money in one instance is not to be weighed for a moment against the failure to prepare in the other.

If disaster comes through lack of preparedness, the fault necessarily lies far less with the men under whom the disaster actually occurs than with those to whose wrong-headedness or short-sighted indifference in time past the lack of…

Without his brilliancy their labor might be wasted, but without their labor his brilliancy would be of no avail.

But only a limited number of men have the moral courage to make these preparations, because there is always risk to the individual making them.

In the second place, it must always be remembered that the power of using the chance aright comes only to the man who has faithfully and for long years made ready himself and his weapons for the possible need.

The public speakers and newspaper writers who may be loudest in clamoring for war are often precisely the men who clamor against preparations for war.

Fifteen years after the close of the contest in which Farragut took rank as one of the great admirals of all time, the splendid navy of which he was the chief ornament had become an object of derision, to every third-rate power in Europe…

The nation realizes that it can not improvise naval officers even out of first-rate skippers of merchantmen and passenger-steamers.

Probably the best way (although no way is infallible) to tell the worth of a naval commander as yet untried in war is to get at the estimate in which he is held by the best fighting men who would have to serve under him.

Our men were as brave as ever, but in war their courage would have been of no more avail than the splendid valor of the men who sank with their guns firing and flags flying when the great Confederate ironclad came out to Hampton Roads.

On the bridge, in the gun-turrets, in the engine-room, and behind the quick-firers, every one alike, from the highest to the lowest, was eager for the war, and was in heart, mind, and body, of the very type which makes the best kind of…

Nevertheless, all this, though indispensable as a base, would mean nothing whatever for the efficiency of the navy without years of careful preparation and training.