r wet his feet as anything.
Some day those niggers will learn how to shoot, and when Funston
attempts to swim a river he will get a bullet through the head, and
Lawton and MacArthur, who stand up in plain sight and let them practice
will wish they hadn't. We boys have decided to support the President
until he conquers those people, if that is what he is trying to do, but,
by gosh, if he does not wake up and quit looking pleasant, and seeming
to hope that Filipino shower is going to blow over, we feel that he will
wake up some morning and find that a nigger tornado has struck his brave
boys at Manila, and they will be in the cyclone cellars waiting for
somebody to come and dig them out. Don't you think so, Uncle Ike?"

"I say, boy," said Uncle Ike, as he lighted up the pipe, after letting
it go out while listening to the war talk of the excited boy, "do you
think you could arrange your affairs so as to leave here by tomorrow
evening and take the limited for Washington? Would you accept the
vacancy in the office of secretary of war? I know this offer comes
sudden to you, and that you will have no time to consult your debating
society as to whether you ought to accept the position, but when you
reflect that the country is in a critical situation, and needs a man of
blood and iron to steer the craft through among the rocks, I feel that
you cannot refuse. The ideas you express are so near like those that
General Jackson would express if he were alive, that I feel the country
would be blessed if you were in a position to brace up the President.
Now go wash your face, and I will wire the President that you will be
there day after tomorrow morning. But if you go there thinking, as many
people seem to think, that the President's backbone is made of banana
pulp, and that he is not alive to the situation, you will make a
mistake. There are chumps like you all over this country that wonder
why they have not been selected to run this country, who think the
commander-in-chief is running ward politics instead of the affairs of
the country. Of course, a President gets under obligations to different
elements in a campaign, and finds it necessary to surround himself with
a cabinet, a few members of which are not worth powder to blow them
up, but if they were all weak and vicious on the make, and political
ciphers, and the President himself is all right, the country will not go
very far wrong. What you boys want to do is to debate less on