This will be a long business letter. I sent to you the examination
papers for West Point and Annapolis. I have thought a great deal over
the matter, and discussed it at great length with Mother. I feel on the
one hand that I ought to give you my best advice, and yet on the other
hand I do not wish to seem to constrain you against your wishes. If you
have definitely made up your mind that you have an overmastering desire
to be in the Navy or the Army, and that such a career is the one in
which you will take a really heart-felt interest--far more so than any
other--and that your greatest chance for happiness and usefulness
will lie in doing this one work to which you feel yourself especially
drawn--why, under such circumstances, I have but little to say. But I am
not satisfied that this is really your feeling. It seemed to me more as
if you did not feel drawn in any other direction, and wondered what you
were going to do in life or what kind of work you would turn your hand
to, and wondered if you could make a success or not; and that you are
therefore inclined to turn to the Navy or Army chiefly because you would
then have a definite and settled career in life, and could hope to go
on steadily without any great risk of failure. Now, if such is your
thought, I shall quote to you what Captain Mahan said of his son when
asked why he did not send him to West Point or Annapolis. "I have too
much confidence in him to make me feel that it is desirable for him to
enter either branch of the service."
I have great confidence in you. I believe you have the ability and,
above all, the energy, the perseverance, and the common sense, to
win out in civil life. That you will have some hard times and some
discouraging times I have no question; but this is merely another way of
saying that you will share the common lot. Though you will have to work
in different ways from those in which I worked, you will not have to
work any harder, nor to face periods of more discouragement. I trust in
your ability, and especially your character, and I am confident you will
win.
In the Army and the Navy the chance for a man to show great ability and
rise above his fellows does not occur on the average more than once in a
generation. When I was down at Santiago it was melancholy for me to see
how fossilized and lacking in ambition, and generally useless, were most
of the men of my age and over, who had served their lives in the Army.
The Navy for the last few years has been better, but for twenty years
after the Civil War there was less chance in the Navy than in the Army
to practise, and do, work of real consequence. I have actually known
lieutenants in both the Army and the Navy who were grandfathers--men
who had seen their children married before they themselves attained the
grade of captain. Of course the chance may come at any time when the
man of West Point or Annapolis who will have stayed in the Army or Navy
finds a great war on, and therefore has the opportunity to rise high.
Under such circumstances, I think that the man of such training who has
actually left the Army or the Navy has even more chance of rising than
the man who has remained in it. Moreover, often a man can do as I did in
the Spanish War, even though not a West Pointer.
This last point raises the question about you going to West Point
or Annapolis and leaving the Army or Navy after you have served the
regulation four years (I think that is the number) after graduation from
the academy. Under this plan you would have an excellent education and
a grounding in discipline and, in some ways, a testing of your capacity
greater than I think you can get in any ordinary college. On the other
hand, except for the profession of an engineer, you would have had
nothing like special training, and you would be so ordered about, and
arranged for, that you would have less independence of character than
you could gain from them. You would have had fewer temptations; but
you would have had less chance to develop the qualities which overcome
temptations and show that a man has individual initiative. Supposing you
entered at seventeen, with the intention of following this course. The
result would be that at twenty-five you would leave the Army or Navy
without having gone through any law school or any special technical
school of any kind, and would start your life work three or four years
later than your schoolfellows of to-day, who go to work immediately
after leaving college. Of course, under such circumstances, you might
study law, for instance, during the four years after graduation; but my
own feeling is that a man does good work chiefly when he is in something
which he intends to make his permanent work, and in which he is deeply
interested. Moreover, there will always be the chance that the number of
officers in the Army or Navy will be deficient, and that you would have
to stay in the service instead of getting out when you wished.
I want you to think over all these matters very seriously. It would be a
great misfortune for you to start into the Army or Navy as a career, and
find that you had mistaken your desires and had gone in without really
weighing the matter.
You ought not to enter unless you feel genuinely drawn to the life as a
life-work. If so, go in; but not otherwise.
Mr. Loeb told me to-day that at 17 he had tried for the army, but
failed. The competitor who beat him in is now a captain; Mr. Loeb has
passed him by, although meanwhile a war has been fought. Mr. Loeb says
he wished to enter the army because he did not know what to do, could
not foresee whether he would succeed or fail in life, and felt the army
would give him "a living and a career." Now if this is at bottom your
feeling I should advise you not to go in; I should say yes to some boys,
but not to you; I believe in you too much, and have too much confidence
in you.