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President Wilson's Addresses by Woodrow Wilson
page 88 of 308 (28%)
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.

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
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