agriculture and the girls to the department of finance, manufactures,
education and information, distributed all over the republic so as to
become acquainted with the people in general, by so doing wiping out
sectional feeling and realizing that God was their father and that they
all belonged to a common brother- and sisterhood united together under a
government for the people, of the people, and by the people. I paid a
visit to the navy yard and inspected two battleships that were
undergoing some slight repairs to their machinery.

One was a second-class battleship and her dimensions and armament were
as follows: Length five hundred and twenty-five feet, breadth of beam
seventy-five feet, draught of water twenty feet and six inches, height
of gun deck from the water line twelve feet; armament: ten twelve-inch
caliber guns mounted in turrets on the center line of the ship. The
turrets were bolted to the deck, five of them forward and five aft, and
were eighteen feet in diameter, eight feet high, with a slope from deck
to parapet of thirty degrees and made of armor steel twelve inches
thick. One gun in each turret and the guns could swing around on
four-fifths of the circle, so that every gun could be brought to bear on
an enemy either to port or starboard. No other guns were carried in time
of war and no cruisers, torpedo boats, or torpedoes were used, for
experience in war had shown that they were useless waste of men and
money. The battleship was propelled by rotary engines developing fifty
thousand horsepower, driving the ship at a sustained speed of thirty
knots an hour. The ship had four propellers, two on each side at the
stern, and the boilers were heated by petroleum with automatic feed. The
engineer informed me that they had tried gasoline and other explosives
(for the rotary engines worked well with them) but they endangered the
safety of the ship and the lives of the crew. There were only two decks
in the ship, the lower deck just above the waterline and the gun deck;