The conditions of good work ha\'e grown more exacting with every year, till the Academy has been cramped for the lack of modern facilities and equipment. The barracks have been overcrowded and insufficiently furnished with such conveniences as light, water, and heat. The cavalry and artillery drill-room and grounds have proved inadequate to the needs of the school ; the lecture-rooms and laboratories are too small, and are constantly overcrowded, and all of the scientific departments are cramped. To meet the demands that have so obvioush^ grown out of the real needs of the institution. Congress, during May, 1902, voted in confirmation of a bill calling for the appropriation of five million dollars to be expended principalh' in new buildings and topographical improvements at West Point. The additions when completed will include an extension of the barracks, a new academic building, a power-house, officers' mess hall, chapel, cavalry and artillery barracks and stables,

37^ The Hudson River

additions to several of the buildings now in use, and an enlargement of the plain for purposes of cavalry and artillery drill. But it has been wisely considered inadvisable to destroy the old buildings now in use or make any radical changes in their structure or arrangement. They are the witnesses of a hundred years, connected with the names of the nation's heroes, and rich with the traditions of successive generations of brave men. In spite of the fact, or it may be because of the fact, that we are not a soldier people, the sentiment of the nation centres at West Point more really than even at the White House or the Capitol. Perhaps no nation on earth has ever seen a case parallel to that of the United States, that has gone through most of its history without a standing army worthy of mention, yet has persistently trained men (as few men have ever been trained elsewhere) in all the science of war and the practice of manly exercises, to find them in the hour of national stress the nucleus of an army of unexcelled strength.