the vivid personality of the loved and lost leader; something in his eye and his manner, more in the startling candor with which he spoke of things it would be premature to give the world, and, above all, the absence of all alarm about being reported—­the unconscious consciousness that one must know this was private and no caution needed.  A verbatim report of the Admiral would, however, harm no one, signify high-toned candor and a certain breezy simplicity in the treatment of momentous matters.  Evidently here was a man not posing, a hero because his character was heroic, a genuine personage—­not artificial, proclamatory, a picker of phrases, but a doer of deeds that explain themselves; a man with imagination, not fantastic but realistic, who must have had a vision during the night after the May-day battle of what might be the great hereafter; beholding under the southern constellations the gigantic shadow of America, crowned with stars, with the archipelagoes of Asia under her feet and broad and mighty destinies at command.

It was the next day that he anchored precisely where his famous ship was swinging when I sat beside him; and his words to the representative of three centuries of Spanish misrule had in them an uncontemplated flash from the flint and steel of fixed purpose and imperial force.  “Fire another gun at my ships and I will destroy your city.”

We can hardly realize in America how flagrant Europeanism has been in the Manila Bay; how the big German guns bought by Spain looked from their embrasures; how a powerful German fleet persisted in asserting antagonism to Americanism, and tested in many ways the American Admiral’s knowledge of his rights and his country’s policy until Admiral Dewey told, not the German Admiral, as has been reported, but his flag lieutenant, “Can it be possible that your nation means war with mine?  If so, we can begin it in five minutes.”  The limit had been reached, and the line was drawn; and Dewey’s words will go down in our records with those of Charles Francis Adams to Lord John Russell about the ironclads built in England for the Confederacy:  “My Lord, I need not point out to your lordship that this is war.”

Perhaps the German Admiral had exceeded the instructions of his Imperial Government, and the peremptory words of the American Admiral caused a better understanding, making for peace rather than for war.

Next to the Americans the English have taken a pride in Admiral Dewey, and they are in the Asiatic atmosphere our fast friends.  They do not desire that we should give up the Philippines.  On the contrary, they want us to keep the islands, and the more we become interested in those waters and along their shores, the better.  They know that the world has practically grown smaller and, therefore, the British Empire more compact; and they find Russia their foe.  They see that with the Pacific Coast our base of operations looking westward, we have first the Hawaiian Islands