48 Dreadnoughts As America's Goal.

New York Times 100 years ago today, April 11, 1913:
Capt. Hood Tells Navy League Smaller Fleet Will Be Inadequate in 1925.
APPLAUSE FOR ROOSEVELT
Assistant Secretary's Plea for Efficient Navy Thought to Reflect Chief's Views.
    WASHINGTON, April 10.— Condemning the lack of a consistent policy of naval development to meet a definite end, namely, the guarantee of the peace of the Nation, and characterizing the United States Fleet of to-day as "too small and heterogeneous to meet the ends which justify its maintenance and too large to be carried as a burden for a plaything," Capt. John Hood of the General Navy Board, appealed to the Navy League to-day to work for the building up of a navy fit to match that of any other great power except Great Britain.
    "Not counting the British fleet, with which no conflict need ever be feared." he said, "in 1920 Germany can put to sea, forty-one battleships, of which twenty-five will be dreadnoughts, and also fifteen battle cruisers; France will have thirty-eight capital ships, of which twenty-three will be dreadnoughts; Japan will have thirty-six, of which seventeen will be dreadnoughts or dreadnought cruisers. Nothing short of the General Board's policy of forty-eight battleships for the United States can even approach adequacy, and a fleet inadequate is a burden without protection. At our present rate of growth armaments thirty-three ships, all told, of which only sixteen will be dreadnoughts.
    "Take as the basis of your naval policy a building programme that will give us by 1925 a fleet of forty-eight first-line battleships, with the lesser units and auxiliaries that go with them, since it is hopeless to attain that result by 1920, the date originally called for by the General Board policy.
    "We have inherited from our fathers no entangling alliances, but we have the Monroe Doctrine. As the nations or Europe and Asia become overcrowded with their ever-increasing populations this doctrine promises to be a fruitful source of contention and challenge, and it is no stronger than the American fleet. There is the principle of Asiatic exclusion, the principle known as the open door policy, and there is our determination to assume military control of the Panama Canal territory and its contiguous waters. I do not believe the Nation stands ready to modify or abandon any of these principles, and only a lack of knowledge by the people at large is responsible for keeping the country in a state of unreadiness to maintain them with reasonable surety of continued peace and honor."
    An efficient navy, large and powerful enough to maintain the Nation's prestige, is the policy of the new Administration, as outlined to the members of the league by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy. His statement created enthusiasm. It was regarded as directly reflecting the views of Secretary Daniels and the White House.
    Mr. Roosevelt called on the members of the league to aid in populating the naval establishment, and declared that as effective work could be done outside the navy as within it.
    "This is not a question of war or peace," he said. " I take it there are as many advocates of arbitration and international peace in the navy as in any other profession. But we are confronted with a condition — the fact that our Nation has decided in the past to have a fleet, and that war still is a possibility." "We want the country to feel that in the maintaining of a fighting force of the highest efficiency we are, at the same time, educating thousands of young men to be better citizens and to be in a position to help themselves when they leave the service. We want to give them industrial education under ideal conditions. Most of all, we will help create a mercantile marine owned by us and run by us."
    Perry Belmont urged the creation of a National council of defense as an expert body to advise Congress on military questions, and pointed out that one of the planks of the Democratic Convention at Baltimore declared in favor or it.
    The convention was devoted to discussions to-day, but to-morrow the delegates, of whom there are several hundred, will be entertained at a special cavalry drill at Fort Myer. The convention will end to-morrow night with a banquet in honor of Secretary Daniels, at which one of the principal guests will be Vice President Marshall.