I am particularly glad to express my admiration for the kind of organization which you have drawn together.  I have attended banquets of chambers of commerce in various parts of the country and have got the impression at each of those banquets that there was only one city in the country.  It has seemed to me that those associations were meant in order to destroy men’s perspective, in order to destroy their sense of relative proportions.  Worst of all, if I may be permitted to say so, they were intended to boost something in particular.  Boosting is a very unhandsome thing.  Advancing enterprise is a very handsome thing, but to exaggerate local merits in order to create disproportion in the general development is not a particularly handsome thing or a particularly intelligent thing.  A city cannot grow on the face of a great state like a mushroom on that one spot.  Its roots are throughout the state, and unless the state it is in, or the region it draws from, can itself thrive and pulse with life as a whole, the city can have no healthy growth.  You forget the wide rootages of everything when you boost some particular region.  There are dangers which probably you all understand in the mere practice of advertisement.  When a man begins to advertise himself there are certain points that are somewhat exaggerated, and I have noticed that men who exaggerate most, most quickly lose any proper conception of what their own proportions are.  Therefore, these local centers of enthusiasm may be local centers of mistake if they are not very wisely guided and if they do not themselves realize their relations to the other centers of enthusiasm and of advancement.

The advantage about a Chamber of Commerce of the United States is that there is only one way to boost the United States, and that is by seeing to it that the conditions under which business is done throughout the whole country are the best possible conditions.  There cannot be any disproportion about that.  If you draw your sap and your vitality from all quarters, then the more sap and vitality there is in you the more there is in the commonwealth as a whole, and every time you lift at all you lift the whole level of manufacturing and mercantile enterprise.  Moreover, the advantage of it is that you cannot boost the United States in that way without understanding the United States.  You learn a great deal.  I agreed with a colleague of mine in the Cabinet the other day that we had never attended in our lives before a school to compare with that we were now attending for the purpose of gaining a liberal education.

Of course, I learn a great many things that are not so, but the interesting thing about that is this:  Things that are not so do not match.  If you hear enough of them, you see there is no pattern whatever; it is a crazy quilt.  Whereas, the truth always matches, piece by piece, with other parts of the truth.  No man can lie consistently, and he cannot lie about everything if he talks to you long.  I would guarantee