I abhor unjust war.  I abhor injustice and bullying by the strong at the expense of the weak, whether among nations or individuals.  I abhor violence and bloodshed.  I believe that war should never be resorted to when, or so long as, it is honorably possible to avoid it.  I respect all men and women who from high motives and with sanity and self-respect do all they can to avert war.  I advocate preparation for war in order to avert war; and I should never advocate war unless it were the only alternative to dishonor.  I describe the folly of which so many of our people were formerly guilty, in order that we may in our own day be on our guard against similar folly.

We did not at the time of which I write take our foreign duties seriously, and as we combined bluster in speech with refusal to make any preparation whatsoever for action, we were not taken seriously in return.  Gradually a slight change for the better occurred, the writings of Captain Mahan playing no small part therein.  We built some modern cruisers to start with; the people who felt that battle-ships were wicked compromising with their misguided consciences by saying that the cruisers could be used “to protect our commerce”—­which they could not be, unless they had battle-ships to back them.  Then we attempted to build more powerful fighting vessels, and as there was a section of the public which regarded battle-ships as possessing a name immorally suggestive of violence, we compromised by calling the new ships armored cruisers, and making them combine with exquisite nicety all the defects and none of the virtues of both types.  Then we got to the point of building battle-ships.  But there still remained a public opinion, as old as the time of Jefferson, which thought that in the event of war all our problem ought to be one of coast defense, that we should do nothing except repel attack; an attitude about as sensible as that of a prize-fighter who expected to win by merely parrying instead of hitting.  To meet the susceptibilities of this large class of well-meaning people, we provided for the battle-ships under the name of “coast defense battle-ships”; meaning thereby that we did not make them quite as seaworthy as they ought to have been, or with quite as much coal capacity as they ought to have had.  Then we decided to build real battle-ships.  But there still remained a lingering remnant of public opinion that clung to the coast defense theory, and we met this in beautiful fashion by providing for “sea-going coast defense battle-ships”—­the fact that the name was a contradiction in terms being of very small consequence compared to the fact that we did thereby get real battle-ships.