with the guns, you have grown more skilful still; and through practice you have improved in battle tactics, though here there is more room for improvement than in your gunnery.  Incidentally, I suppose I need hardly say that one measure of your fitness must be your clear recognition of the need always steadily to strive to render yourselves more fit; if you ever grow to think that you are fit enough, you can make up your minds that from that moment you will begin to go backward.

“As a war-machine, the fleet comes back in better shape than it went out.  In addition, you, the officers and men of this formidable fighting force, have shown yourselves the best of all possible ambassadors and heralds of peace.  Wherever you have landed you have borne yourselves so as to make us at home proud of being your countrymen.  You have shown that the best type of fighting man of the sea knows how to appear to the utmost possible advantage when his business is to behave himself on shore, and to make a good impression in a foreign land.  We are proud of all the ships and all the men in this whole fleet, and we welcome you home to the country whose good repute among nations has been raised by what you have done.”

APPENDIX A

THE TRUSTS, THE PEOPLE, AND THE SQUARE DEAL

[Written when Mr. Taft’s administration brought suit to dissolve the steel corporation, one of the grounds for the suit being the acquisition by the Corporation of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company; this action was taken, with my acquiescence, while I was President, and while Mr. Taft was a member of my cabinet; at the time he never protested against, and as far as I knew approved of my action in this case, as in the Harvester Trust case, and all similar cases.]

The suit against the Steel Trust by the Government has brought vividly before our people the need of reducing to order our chaotic Government policy as regards business.  As President, in Messages to Congress I repeatedly called the attention of that body and of the public to the inadequacy of the Anti-Trust Law by itself to meet business conditions and secure justice to the people, and to the further fact that it might, if left unsupplemented by additional legislation, work mischief, with no compensating advantage; and I urged as strongly as I knew how that the policy followed with relation to railways in connection with the Inter-State Commerce Law should be followed by the National Government as regards all great business concerns; and therefore that, as a first step, the powers of the Bureau of Corporations should be greatly enlarged, or else that there should be created a Governmental board or commission, with powers somewhat similar to those of the Inter-State Commerce Commission, but covering the whole field of inter-State business, exclusive of transportation (which should, by law, be kept wholly separate from ordinary industrial business, all common ownership of the industry and the railway being forbidden).  In the end I have always believed that it would also be necessary to give the National Government complete power over the organization and capitalization of all business concerns engaged in inter-State commerce.