perpetuate the memory of American military and
naval achievements. Respect for the American flag was taught in schools,
and the question was debated as to whether its use in comic opera
indicated respect or insult. This new nationalism was unlike the
expansionist movement of the fifties in that it laid no particular
stress upon the incorporation of the neighboring republics by a process
of federation. On the whole, the people had lost their faith in the
assimilating influence of republican institutions and did not desire to
annex alien territory and races. They were now more concerned with the
consolidation of their own country and with its place in the world. Nor
were they as neglectful as their fathers had been of the material means
by which to accomplish their somewhat indefinite purposes.

The reconstruction of the American Navy, which had attained such
magnitude and played so important a part in the Civil War but which
had been allowed to sink into the merest insignificance, was begun by
William E. Chandler, the Secretary of the Navy under President Arthur.
William C. Whitney, his successor under President Cleveland, continued
the work with energy. Captain Alfred T. Mahan began in 1883 to publish
that series of studies in naval history which won him world-wide
recognition and did so much to revolutionize prevailing conceptions of
naval strategy. A Naval War College was established in 1884, at Newport,
Rhode Island, where naval officers could continue the studies which they
had begun at Annapolis.

The total neglect of the army was not entirely the result of
indifference. The experience with volunteers in the Civil War had given
almost universal confidence that the American people could constitute
themselves an army at will. The presence of several heroes of that war
in succession in the position of commander-in-chief of the army had
served to diffuse a sense of security among the people. Here and there
military drill was introduced in school and college, but the regular
army attracted none of the romantic interest that clung about the navy,
and the militia was almost totally neglected. Individual officers, such
as young Lieutenant Tasker Bliss, began to study the new technique of
warfare which was to make fighting on land as different from that of the
wars of Napoleon as naval warfare was different from that of the time of
Nelson. Yet in spite of obviously changing conditions, no provision
was made for the encoura