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BLIC LIBRARY

BOSTON CITY CLUB

ASTOR, LENOX

DEN FOUNDATIONS

BULLETIN

FOR THE INFORMATION OF MEMBERS OF THE CLUB

"This Club is founded in the spirit of good fellowship and every member of the Club knows every other member without an introduction."

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Dinner at six o'clock. Tickets at Civic Secretary's office.

Kremser

Thursday Evening, December 10

ANNUAL CLUB DINNER

Following the custom of past years, the eighth anniversary of the opening of this Club House will be observed with a dinner for members only.

PRESIDENT FISH will preside, all ex-Presidents of the Club and present and past members of the Board of Governors will be present. An interesting program will be arranged.

The Boston Philharmonic Orchestra will furnish music.
William E. Smith will assume the rôle of song leader.

The price of the dinner will be $1.00. Tickets may be secured at the office of the Civic Secretary.

Thursday Evening, December 17

DR. JOHN COWPER POWYS, M. A.

will deliver an address upon

"TEUTON, SLAV, AND LATIN RACE IDEALS"

Those who were present at the dinner preceding "European Experiences Night" will remember the brilliant remarks offered by Dr. Powys, and in compliance with the requests of many members the Entertainment Committee has effected the above arrangements.

A DINNER will be tendered Dr. Powys at six o'clock. Tickets may be procured at the office of the Civic Secretary.

Thursday Evening, December 24

Regular Club entertainment will be omitted on account of Christmas. Thursday Evening, December 31

NEW YEAR'S EVE

An interesting musical program will be arranged. Something will be doing from

6.30 till 1915

REVIEW OF RECENT CLUB EVENTS

BANQUET TO HON. GEORGE VON L. MEYER Thursday Evening, October 29

Vice-President James W. Rollins presided at the head table, and beside the guest of the evening were seated Hon. Louis A. Frothingham, Toastmaster; Second Vice-President William T. A. Fitzgerald; Mr. Charles L. Burrill; Mr. Charles K. Cummings; Dr. DeWitt G. Wilcox; Mr. Frederick S. Morrison, Secretary of the Navy Y. M. C. A.; Mr. F. Tucker Burr; and the Civic Secretary.

Vice-President Rollins, in introducing the Toastmaster, said:

"Gentlemen of the Boston City Club. We are gathered here this evening to do honor to one of our own distinguished citizens, and I know you will join me in tendering to him our cordial greetings. A man that can pursue the arts of peace, with honor to himself in this country, and afterwards prepare that same nation for war, is one to be doubly honored. And a man who can prepare for war is sometimes greater than the man who handles the war when it comes. The exercises of this evening are under the direction of the Toastmaster, and I have the pleasure to introduce to you another distinguished citizen, Hon. Louis A. Frothingham."

Mr. Frothingham in his speech accepting the post noted with pride the large number of secretaries of the navy that New England has furnished. He then introduced in turn, Vice-President Fitzgerald, Hon. J. Mitchel Galvin, Dr. DeWitt G. Wilcox, Mr. Charles K. Cummings, Mr. Frederick S. Morrison, Rev. Ernest S. Meredith, and Dr. Francis M. Donoghue.

In introducing the speaker of the evening, Mr. Frothingham said: "Fellow Members of the City Club. We have had very many distinguished speakers here and many most interesting evenings, but I am sure none will surpass the pleasure we are going to have this evening; because we are going to listen to the discussion of a topic which is such a live one to-day, with the dreadful conflict and devastation across the seas. There we find not only the surface of the water used by the navy, but the air above the water and the water underneath the surface.

"We are fortunate to have near by in Massachusetts so distinguished a man whom we can call on as an expert on naval matters, a man who has served not only his city and his State, but also has served the United States with distinction abroad, both in Italy and in Russia, and has served in two Cabinet offices and in two Cabinets."

Address of Hon. George von L. Meyer

"Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the City Club, let me first of all congratulate you upon the wonderful growth and success of this Club. It was organized while I was away. Otherwise I hope I should have had the privilege of being one of your members. At the same time I want to express my appreciation at being invited to address you and to

assure you that you have got a Secretary whom no one can refuse. (Loud applause.)

"Before going into the subject formally, I want to talk to you informally as to what led up to my becoming Secretary of the Navy. While I was Ambassador at Italy I received word from a source that was authentic that within a comparatively short period I would be called to enter the Cabinet of President Roosevelt, and that it would be probably the portfolio of the Secretary of the Navy. I immediately took that opportunity, as I was abroad, to gather all the information that I could as to navies on the Continent. In Italy I was able to learn considerable about torpedoes, because they were making that a specialty. They were also studying in a scientific manner the revolutions of the screw, and the Governor told me one day that they had had a rather peculiar experience with one of their ships. It had been guaranteed a speed of sixteen knots an hour, but had never made more than twelve; and one day, as they entered the harbor, they struck a reef or rock and one blade was knocked off. The occasion was such that they could not mend the blade, but they went out to sea to follow some service, and to their surprise the ship made sixteen knots an hour for the first time.

"While in Italy I had an opportunity on several occasions to go to Kiel, and there I was able to see something of the thoroughness with which their naval affairs are conducted. Also I saw that wonderful factory of Krupps, and while in Italy I was suddenly called on to go to St. Petersburg in order to carry out instructions of President Roosevelt, and to do what I could to bring about pourparlers between Japan and Russia. There I was able to see the other side of the shield and to see what disaster it was to have inefficiency in the navy. I am speaking of the period before or during the Japanese War. It demonstrated to my mind the terrible consequences to a country that does not have naval or military efficiency.

"During this period in Russia I had opportunity to study the English navy to some extent, and I saw the highest efficiency, carried to such a degree that with their marksmanship I am satisfied that they can give an account of themselves which no other navy can give.

"One day, while at Moscow, I took up the paper and saw the appointments that had been sent into the Senate, and among them saw that I was put down as Postmaster General. I realized then that I was to be a civilian general and not the head of Uncle Sam's Navy. But that experience was invaluable to me because it enabled me to see the methods of the Bureau and the necessity of cooperation between those Bureaus and the consequences of lack of team work. It was my opportunity to reorganize the post-office department at that time, to bring the heads of the Bureaus together weekly in my office to get cooperation and to get team work, and to reduce duplication of labor.

"Two years later I became Secretary of the Navy in President Taft's administration. And there I found that the Navy was being carried on under a system which had existed in 1848. In those days they were spending not more than $20,000,000, and when I entered it we were

spending $125,000,000. Some bureaus had grown top heavy. There was duplication of work. There was a lack of understanding between the different bureaus, and while my predecessors-and there had been six in seven years-had recognized that and had made wise recommendations to Congress, Congress had never acted. on those recommendations. I therefore felt it was necessary to do something specific and to do it at once. For that reason I followed a method which I once heard President Eliot speak of; that the reason of the success of Harvard University was that they had worked through groups of men. Now in the Navy we have probably a body of men that are not equaled in any other branch of the Government or in civic life, for their general education. I believe there is no school or college or university which turns out such efficient and able and thoroughly educated men as Annapolis, and I was able to put up certain problems of organization and administration to different groups of men carefully selected for that purpose. And after they had worked with me and I with them for several months, they worked out a solution which I had to take the responsibility of adopting. And realizing that my recommendation would probably follow the course of those of my predecessors, I consulted the Department of Justice in order to know how far I could go and be within the law.

"Now Congress has always been averse to a staff, and therefore it was necessary to give them a sugar-coated pill, and in order to have a staff and yet not encounter objection by Congress, I called them aids.

There are four logical divisions of the Navy; the division which has to do with the movement of ships; the division of personnel, which has charge of the men and their appointments; the material division which has the great bureaus of construction, engineering, ordnance, and supplies; and then there is the division of inspection. The division of material is the division which is composed of different departments which builds the ships and maintains them. The division of inspection is the division which should inspect the finished materials. And at the head of each of those divisions I nominated an expert officer in each case after due consideration, selected from the men best qualified to fill that position. And those aids, as I called them, were really a staff, and they were the council of the Secretary of the Navy. In that way a Secretary did not get under the influence of one individual, but he had expert advisers from the Navy itself.

"Now if a big corporation is successful, it is shown in two ways; first, by its output, which the public can judge of and will consume, if it is satisfactory; and, secondly, its dividends, which demonstrate to the stockholders the success of its management. Now the Navy Department is a great big corporation, with great big manufacturing, machine shops, and the only output which the Navy has is military efficiency, and the only dividend which the people can judge by and which is an enormous dividend, is success over the enemy. Now what I was striving for, and what the officers throughout the Navy supported me in, in a way which I love to dwell upon, was military efficiency. And the watchword was that the fleet, that the Navy, that everything in the Navy,

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