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;