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What does the United States stand for, then, that our hearts should be stirred by the memory of the men who set her Constitution up? John Barry fought, like every other man in the Revolution, in order that America might be free to make her own life without interruption or disturbance from any other quarter. You can sum the whole thing up in that, that America had a right to her own self-determined life; and what are our corollaries from that? You do not have to go back to stir your thoughts again with the issues of the Revolution. Some of the issues of the Revolution were not the cause of it, but merely the occasion for it. There are just as vital things stirring now that concern the existence of the Nation as were stirring then, and every man who worthily stands in this presence should examine himself and see whether he has the full conception of what it means that America should live her own life. Washington saw it when he wrote his farewell address. It was not merely because of passing and transient circumstances that Washington said that we must keep free from entangling alliances. It was because he saw that no country had yet set its face in the same direction in which America had set her face. We cannot form alliances with those who are not going our way; and in our might and majesty and in the confidence and definiteness of our own purpose we need not and we should not form alliances with any nation in the world. Those who are right, those who study their consciences in determining their policies, those who hold their honor higher than their advantage, do not need alliances. You need alliances when you are not strong, and you

are weak only when you are not true to yourself. You are weak only when you are in the wrong; you are weak only when you are afraid to do the right; you are weak only when you doubt your cause and the majesty of a nation's might asserted.

There is another corollary. John Barry was an Irishman, but his heart crossed the Atlantic with him. He did not leave it in Ireland. And the test of all of us-for all of us had our origins on the other side of the sea-is whether we will assist in enabling America to live her separate and independent life, retaining our ancient affections, indeed, but determining everything that we do by the interests that exist on this side of the sea. Some Americans need hyphens in their names, because only part of them has come over; but when the whole man has come over, heart and thought and all, the hyphen drops of its own weight out of his name. This man was not an Irish-American; he was an Irishman who became an American. I venture to say if he voted he voted with regard to the questions as they looked on this side of the water and not as they affected the other side; and that is my infallible test of a genuine American, that when he votes or when he acts or when he fights his heart and his thought are centered nowhere but in the emotions and the purposes and the policies of the United States.

This man illustrates for me all the splendid strength which we brought into this country by the magnet of freedom. Men have been drawn to this country by the same thing that has made us love this country-by the opportunity to live their own lives and to think

their own thoughts and to let their whole natures expand with the expansion of a free and mighty Nation. We have brought out of the stocks of all the world all the best impulses and have appropriated them and Americanized them and translated them into the glory and majesty of a great country.

So, ladies and gentlemen, when we go out from this presence we ought to take this idea with us that we, too, are devoted to the purpose of enabling America to live her own life, to be the justest, the most progressive, the most honorable, the most enlightened Nation in the world. Any man that touches our honor is our enemy. Any man who stands in the way of the kind of progress which makes for human freedom cannot call himself our friend. Any man who does not feel behind him the whole push and rush and compulsion that filled men's hearts in the time of the Revolution is no American. No man who thinks first of himself and afterwards of his country can call himself an American. 'America must be enriched by us. We must not live upon her; she must live by means of us.

I, for one, come to this shrine to renew the impulses of American democracy. I would be ashamed of myself if I went away from this place without realizing again that every bit of selfishness must be purged from our policy, that every bit of self-seeking must be purged from our individual consciences, and that we must be great, if we would be great at all, in the light and illumination of the example of men who gave every-` thing that they were and everything that they had to the glory and honor of America.

ADDRESS TO THE GRADUATING CLASS OF

THE UNITED STATES NAVAL

ACADEMY, JUNE 5, 1914

The United States Naval Academy at Annapolis renders to the Navy the services which the Military Academy established at West Point renders the Army of the United States. The midshipmen, as the students of this institution are called, are appointed, seventeen by the President, twenty-five by the Secre tary of the Navy and three by each Senator and Member of Congress. Upon mental and physical examination they are admitted and pursue a course of four years of technical study at the expense of the United States. The total number allowed by the law is 3,128; the actual number of midshipmen in regular course in the fall of 1917 is 1,442.

It is interesting to recall that the Naval Academy was established on October 10, 1845, without act of Congress, by the distinguished American historian, George Bancroft, then Secretary of the Navy in President Polk's administration, by the simple device of removing the instructors from the men-of-war, who accompanied and instructed the midshipmen, and locating instructors and midshipmen at Annapolis in Fort Severn, assigned to the enterprising Secretary of the Navy by the then Secretary of War.

MR. SUPERINTENDENT, YOUNG GENTLEMEN, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:

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

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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 are 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

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