The generosity of our judgment was made up soon after this great struggle was over.  Men came and sat together again in the Congress and united in all the efforts of peace and of government, and our solemn duty is to see that each one of us is in his own consciousness and in his own conduct a replica of this great reunited people.  It is our duty and our privilege to be like the country we represent and, speaking no word of malice, no word of criticism even, stand shoulder to shoulder to lift the burdens of mankind in the future and show the paths of freedom to all the world.

ANNAPOLIS COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS

[Delivered before the Graduating Class of the United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland, June 5, 1914.]

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 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.