I suppose that war always does bring out what is highest and lowest in human nature.  The contractors who furnish poor materials to the army or the navy in time of war stand on a level of infamy only one degree above that of the participants in the white slave traffic themselves.  But there is conduct far short of this which yet seems inexplicable to any man who has in him any spirit of disinterested patriotism combined with any power of imagination.  Respectable men, who I suppose lack the imagination thoroughly to realize what they are doing, try to make money out of the Nation’s necessities in war at the very time that other men are making every sacrifice, financial and personal, for the cause.  In the closing weeks of my service as Assistant Secretary of the Navy we were collecting ships for auxiliary purposes.  Some men, at cost to their own purses, helped us freely and with efficiency; others treated the affair as an ordinary business transaction; and yet others endeavored, at some given crisis when our need was great, to sell us inferior vessels at exorbitant prices, and used every pressure, through Senators and Congressmen, to accomplish their ends.  In one or two cases they did accomplish them too, until we got a really first-class board established to superintend such purchases.  A more curious experience was in connection with the point chosen for the starting of the expedition against Cuba.  I had not supposed that any human being could consider this matter save from the standpoint of military need.  But one morning a very wealthy and influential man, a respectable and upright man according to his own lights, called on me to protest against our choice of Tampa, and to put in a plea for a certain other port, on the ground that his railroad was entitled to its share of the profit for hauling the army and equipment!  I happened to know that at this time this very man had kinsfolk with the army, who served gallantly, and the circumstances of his coming to me were such as to show that he was not acting secretly, and had no idea that there was anything out of the way in his proposal.  I think the facts were merely that he had been trained to regard business as the sole object in life, and that he lacked the imagination to enable him to understand the real nature of the request that he was making; and, moreover, he had good reason to believe that one of his business competitors had been unduly favored.

The War Department was in far worse shape than the Navy Department.  The young officers turned out from West Point are precisely as good as the young officers turned out from Annapolis, and this always has been true.  But at that time (something has been done to remedy the worst conditions since), and ever since the close of the Civil War, the conditions were such that after a few years the army officer stagnated so far as his profession was concerned.  When the Spanish War broke out the navy really was largely on a war footing, as any navy which is even