So, gentlemen, besides coming down here to give you my personal greeting and to say how absolutely I rely on you and believe in you, I have come down here to say also that I depend on you, depend on you for brains as well as training and courage and discipline. You are doing your job admirably, the job that you have been taught to do; now let us do something that we were never taught to do and do it just as well as we are doing the older and more habitual things, and do not let anybody ever put one thought of discouragement into your minds. I do not know what is the matter with the newspapers of the United States. I suppose they have to vary the tune from time to time just to relieve their minds, but every now and then a wave of the most absurd discouragement and pessimism goes through the country and we hear nothing except of the unusual advantages and equipment and sagacity and preparation and all the other wonderful things of the German Army and Navy. My comment is always the very familiar comment, "Rats!" They are working under infinite disadvantages. They not only have no more brains than we have, but they have a different and less serviceable kind of brains than we have, if we will use the brains we have got. I am not discouraged for a moment, particularly because we have not even begun and, without saying anything in disparagement of those with whom we are associated in the war, I do expect things to begin when we begin. If they do not, American history will have changed its course; the American Army and Navy will have changed their character. There will have to come a new tradition into a service which does not do new and audacious and successful things. A short time after the President made this declaration on his flagship, Admiral Mayo was dispatched to Europe, where he pressed upon the British Admiralty the necessity of constructing the North Sea barrage. Finally in October, six months after the plan had been presented, this great project, in line with President Wilson's idea of bold and new things in naval warfare, was undertaken. From many quarters tips came to the President of possible surprise action and not a few orders to Naval Intelligence to send out secret service men to run down a clue were the result of suggestions emanating from the President. Sometimes, unannounced and unheralded, during the war, he would drop in at the Navy Department, and quite as often at the War Department, and he never came merely to visit, agreeable as social intercourse would have been. He had an idea every time, a practical suggestion, or a desire to be informed of progress in some particular undertaking which he was following with deep interest.