We must therefore bring up and keep up our navy to the highest point of efficiency.

We can afford to have a small army; although we must insist upon its being kept up to the high point of efficiency that I am glad to say our regular army in its individual units has now attained.

But while it is a comparatively simple task to turn a man of the proper character, physique and intelligence into a good soldier, you can not improvise either a battleship or the crew of a battleship.

At sea the battle has to be fought with the ships and the crews that have been prepared before the war begins; and we wish to profit by the lessons of history by seeing that our navy is always kept adequate to our needs.

It is not necessary to have a very large navy; but it is necessary that ship for ship it should be just a little the most efficient navy in the world.

In battle the shots that count are the shots that hit.

But try to make the other fellow’s ship go down first!

I want our people to feel that in assuming to dig the Isthmian canal, in assuming the position we have assumed as regards this Western Hemisphere and in the Oriental seas, we bind ourselves to keep our navy at such a point of efficiency…

Whether President, Governor, Mayor, Congressman, or State Legislator, there are certain basic principles to which we must prove true if we are to make this country what it shall be made.

We can perfectly well afford to differ about the currency or the tariff; but we can not afford to differ about such questions as honesty in public life, decency and cleanliness in private life.

Those qualities and others like them go to the root of the whole question of citizenship.

The Nation of the future will rise higher or not just as the boys and girls of the present are or are not trained to do their duty as men and as women.

If there is any one thing that I respect more than a good man it is a good woman.

If the man is a good father, a good husband; if he is decent and clean in his domestic life; if he does his duty by his neighbor; if he is the kind of a man whom we are glad to have as a neighbor and to do business with, that man is a good…

If the woman is a good wife and mother, she is a good citizen; and not merely a good citizen, but she is the very best kind of citizen that this country can produce.

What we need is not merely desire to perform heroic feats under altogether exceptional circumstances; but the steadfast determination to perform the rather commonplace duties of every day, day by day, as they arise.

Each of you boys here should remember that the way to fit yourself to be of the utmost possible use is so to act that your family likes to have you at home, instead of feeling a relief when you are gone; and it is the same way with the…

We all of us know an occasional foolish mother who says, “I have had to work hard; I have had a pretty hard time, my daughter shall not have to work.” That is not kindness to the daughter.

Do not bring up your boys and girls to be useless, to avoid trouble, to get around trouble, to shirk work.

Therefore in view of the scarcity not only of common labor, but of skilled labor, it becomes doubly important to train every available man to be of the utmost use, by developing his intelligence, his skill, and his capacity for…

Hence the work of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute is a matter of the highest practical importance to both the white man and the black man, and well worth the support of both races alike in the South and in the North.

Every black man who leaves this institute better able to do mechanical or industrial work adds by so much to the wealth of the whole community and benefits all people in the community.

The professional and mercantile avenues to success are overcrowded; for the present the best chance of success awaits the intelligent worker at some mechanical trade or on a farm; for this man will almost certainly achieve industrial…

Merely from the economic standpoint it is of the utmost consequence to all our citizens that institutions such as this at Tuskegee should be a success.

It is not only the duty of the white man, but it is to his interest, to see that the negro is protected in property, in life, and in all his legal rights.