and ward. Roosevelt must have been made unusually merry by such
tidings from Boston, the city which he regarded as particularly
prolific in "the men who formed the lunatic fringe in all reform
movements."

It did not astonish him that the financiers and the business men,
who were amassing great fortunes in peace, should frown on war,
which interrupted their fortune-making; but he laughed when he
remembered what they and many other vague pacifists had been
solemnly proclaiming. There was the Senator, for instance, who
had denied that we needed a Navy, because, if the emergency came,
he said, we could improvise one, and "build a battleship in every
creek." There were also the spread eagle Americans, the
swaggerers and braggarts, who amused themselves in tail-twisting
and insulting other nations so long as they could do this with
impunity; but now they were brought to book, and their fears
magnified the possible danger they might run from the invasion of
irate Spaniards. Their imagination pictured to them the poor old
Spanish warship Viscaya, as having as great possibility for
destruction as the entire British Fleet itself.

At all these things Roosevelt laughed to himself, because they
confirmed the gospel of military and naval preparedness, which he
had been preaching for years, the gospel which these very
opponents reviled him for; but instead of contenting himself by
saying to them, "I told you so," he pushed on preparations for
war at full speed, determined to make the utmost of the existing
resources. The Navy had clearly two tasks before it. It must
blockade Cuba, which entailed the patrol of the Caribbean Sea and
the protection of the Atlantic ports, and it must prevent the