the
Atlantic to the Pacific, to the end that they shall let
Congress know that they have made up their minds to spend a
little of that $187,000,000,000 of which we boast in order
that our wives and our children and our grandchildren shall
not be visited with the calamity which has befallen
Belgium."

Two features of the conference were the reading of a letter
to Hudson Maxim from ex-President Theodore Roosevelt and a
speech on naval unpreparedness by George von L. Meyer,
ex-Secretary of the Navy. The speech is reproduced below in
part, and the letter from Mr. Roosevelt in full, together
with the resolution of the conference.

MR. ROOSEVELT'S LETTER.

My Dear Mr. Maxim:

I thank you heartily for your book on "Defenseless America." It is a
capital book and I believe it is safe to say that no wise and
patriotic American can fail to recognize the service that you have
rendered in writing it. I hope it will have the widest possible
circulation throughout our country.

I was glad to see the first-class letters that have been written you
by such good Americans as Oscar Straus, Garrett P. Serviss, Rear
Admiral W.W. Kimball, C.P. Gray, Holman Day, and the others. On the
other hand, I was saddened by the extraordinary letter sent you by the
three young men who purported to speak for the senior class of the
college of which they are members. The course of conduct which these
men and those like them advocate for the nation would, of course, not
only mean a peculiar craven avoidance of national duty by our people
at this time, but would also inevitably tend permanently to encourage
the spirit of individual cowardice no less than of national cowardice.

The professional pacifists, the professional peace-at-any-price men,
who during the last five years have been so active, who have pushed
the mischievous all-arbitration treaties at Washington, who have
condoned our criminal inactivity as regards Mexico and, above all, as
regards the questions raised by the great world war now raging, and
who have applauded our abject failure to live up to the obligations
imposed upon us as a signatory power of The Hague Convention, are, at
best, an unlovely body of men, and taken as a whole are probably the
most undesirable citizens that this country contains.

But it is less shocking to see such sentiments developed among old men
than among young men. The college students who or