In the closing weeks of my service as Assistant Secretary of the Navy we were collecting ships for auxiliary purposes.

Some men, at cost to their own purses, helped us freely and with efficiency; others treated the affair as an ordinary business transaction; and yet others endeavored, at some given crisis when our need was great, to sell us inferior vessels at exorbitant prices, and used every pressure, through Senators and Congressmen, to accomplish their ends.

In one or two cases they did accomplish them too, until we got a really first-class board established to superintend such purchases.

A more curious experience was in connection with the point chosen for the starting of the expedition against Cuba.

I had not supposed that any human being could consider this matter save from the standpoint of military need.