During the greater part of my life I have been associated with young
men, and on occasions it seems to me without number have faced bodies of
youngsters going out to take part in the activities of the world, but I
have a consciousness of a different significance in this occasion from
that which I have felt on other similar occasions. When I have faced the
graduating classes at universities I have felt that I was facing a great
conjecture. They were going out into all sorts of pursuits and with
every degree of preparation for the particular thing they were expecting
to do; some without any preparation at all, for they did not know what
they expected to do. But in facing you I am facing men who are trained
for a special thing. You know what you are going to do, and you are
under the eye of the whole Nation in doing it. For you, gentlemen, are
to be part of the power of the Government of the United States. There is
a very deep and solemn significance in that fact, and I am sure that
every one of you feels it. The moral is perfectly obvious. Be ready and
fit for anything that you have to do. And keep ready and fit. Do not
grow slack. Do not suppose that your education is over because you have
received your diplomas from the academy. Your education has just begun.
Moreover, you are to have a very peculiar privilege which not many of
your predecessors have had. You are yourselves going to become
teachers. You are going to teach those 50,000 fellow-countrymen of yours
who are the enlisted men of the Navy. You are going to make them fitter
to obey your orders and to serve the country. You are going to make them
fitter to see what the orders mean in their outlook upon life and upon
the service; and that is a great privilege, for out of you is going the
energy and intelligence which are going to quicken the whole body of the
United States Navy.
I congratulate you upon that prospect, but I want to ask you not to get
the professional point of view. I would ask it of you if you were
lawyers; I would ask it of you if you were merchants; I would ask it of
you whatever you expected to be. Do not get the professional point of
view. There is nothing narrower or more unserviceable than the
professional point of view, to have the attitude toward life that it
centers in your profession. It does not. Your profession is only one of
the many activities which are meant to keep the world straight, and to
keep the energy in its blood and in its muscle. We are all of us in this
world, as I understand it, to set forward the affairs of the whole
world, though we play a special part in that great function. The Navy
goes all over the world, and I think it is to be congratulated upon
having that sort of illustration of what the world is and what it
contains; and inasmuch as you are going all over the world you ought to
be the better able to see the relation that your country bears to the
rest of the world.
It ought to be one of your thoughts all the time that you are sample
Americans--not merely sample Navy men, not merely sample soldiers, but
sample Americans--and that you have the point of view of America with
regard to her Navy and her Army; that she is using them as the
instruments of civilization, not as the instruments of aggression. The
idea of America is to serve humanity, and every time you let the Stars
and Stripes free to the wind you ought to realize that that is in itself
a message that you are on an errand which other navies have sometimes
tunes forgotten; not an errand of conquest, but an errand of service. I
always have the same thought when I look at the flag of the United
States, for I know something of the history of the struggle of mankind
for liberty. When I look at that flag it seems to me as if the white
stripes were strips of parchment upon which are written the rights of
man, and the red stripes the streams of blood by which those rights have
been made good. Then in the little blue firmament in the corner have
swung out the stars of the States of the American Union. So it is, as it
were, a sort of floating charter that has come down to us from
Runnymede, when men said, "We will not have masters; we will be a
people, and we will seek our own liberty."
You are not serving a government, gentlemen; you are serving a people.
For we who for the time being constitute the Government are merely
instruments for a little while in the hands of a great Nation which
chooses whom it will to carry out its decrees and who invariably rejects
the man who forgets the ideals which it intended him to serve. So that I
hope that wherever you go you will have a generous, comprehending love
of the people you come into contact with, and will come back and tell
us, if you can, what service the United States can render to the
remotest parts of the world; tell us where you see men suffering; tell
us where you think advice will lift them up; tell us where you think
that the counsel of statesmen may better the fortunes of unfortunate
men; always having it in mind that you are champions of what is right
and fair all 'round for the public welfare, no matter where you are, and
that it is that you are ready to fight for and not merely on the drop
of a hat or upon some slight punctilio, but that you are champions of
your fellow-men, particularly of that great body one hundred million
strong whom you represent in the United States.
What do you think is the most lasting impression that those boys down at
Vera Cruz are going to leave? They have had to use some force--I pray
God it may not be necessary for them to use any more--but do you think
that the way they fought is going to be the most lasting impression?
Have men not fought ever since the world began? Is there anything new in
using force? The new things in the world are the things that are
divorced from force. The things that show the moral compulsions of the
human conscience, those are the things by which we have been building up
civilization, not by force. And the lasting impression that those boys
are going to leave is this, that they exercise self-control; that they
are ready and diligent to make the place where they went fitter to live
in than they found it; that they regarded other people's rights; that
they did not strut and bluster, but went quietly, like self-respecting
gentlemen, about their legitimate work. And the people of Vera Cruz, who
feared the Americans and despised the Americans, are going to get a very
different taste in their mouths about the whole thing when the boys of
the Navy and the Army come away. Is that not something to be proud of,
that you know how to use force like men of conscience and like
gentlemen, serving your fellow-men and not trying to overcome them? Like
that gallant gentleman who has so long borne the heats and perplexities
and distresses of the situation in Vera Cruz--Admiral Fletcher. I
mention him, because his service there has been longer and so much of
the early perplexities fell upon him. I have been in almost daily
communication with Admiral Fletcher, and I have tested his temper. I
have tested his discretion. I know that he is a man with a touch of
statesmanship about him, and he has grown bigger in my eye each day as I
have read his dispatches, for he has sought always to serve the thing he
was trying to do in the temper that we all recognize and love to believe
is typically American.
I challenge you youngsters to go out with these conceptions, knowing
that you are part of the Government and force of the United States and
that men will judge us by you. I am not afraid of the verdict. I cannot
look in your faces and doubt what it will be, but I want you to take
these great engines of force out onto the seas like adventurers enlisted
for the elevation of the spirit of the human race. For that is the only
distinction that America has. Other nations have been strong, other
nations have piled wealth as high as the sky, but they have come into
disgrace because they used their force and their wealth for the
oppression of mankind and their own aggrandizement; and America will not
bring glory to herself, but disgrace, by following the beaten paths of
history. We must strike out upon new paths, and we must count upon you
gentlemen to be the explorers who will carry this spirit and spread this
message all over the seas and in every port of the civilized world.
You see, therefore, why I said that when I faced you I felt there was a
special significance. I am not present on an occasion when you are about
to scatter on various errands. You are all going on the same errand, and
I like to feel bound with you in one common organization for the glory
of America. And her glory goes deeper than all the tinsel, goes deeper
than the sound of guns and the clash of sabers; it goes down to the very
foundations of those things that have made the spirit of men free and
happy and content.