t
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