The one thing that you graduates here, and all of the others in this school, must remember, is that you ought to bend your entire energies to fitting yourselves as you can only be fitted by the most careful training in advance for the possible supreme day when upon your success or your failure will depend not only whether your own lives will be crowned with triumph or blasted with ruin, but whether the Nation will or will not write a page of glory or a page of shame on her history. There is not one of you who is not derelict in his duty to the whole Nation if he fails to prepare himself with all the strength that in him lies to do his duty should the occasion arise; and one of your great duties is to see that shots hit. The result is going to largely depend upon whether you or your adversary hits. I expect you to be brave. I rather take that for granted. It is not that you are to be commended much for bravery. You would be condemned forever if you lacked it. If you lacked it in the highest form, courage physical and moral, the courage that will assume responsibility, no less than the courage that without a thought will face death, that we have a right to expect from every one of you, and I say that you are less to be commended for having it than to be condemned for failure to have it. But, in addition, you have got to prepare yourselves in advance. Every naval action that has taken place within the last twenty years in which our own ships have been engaged or in which any foreign ships have been engaged has shown, as a rule, that the defeated party has suffered not from lack of courage, but because it could not make the best use of its weapons, or had not been given the right weapons. Occasionally, of course, if the victor happened to be matched against people who did not show courage, the courage counted. But I want every one here to proceed upon the assumption that any foe he may meet will have the courage. Of course, you have got to show the highest degree of courage yourself or you will be beaten anyhow, and you will deserve to be; but in addition to that you must prepare yourselves by careful training so that you may make the best possible use of the delicate and formidable mechanism of a modern warship. The reason that you are trained here, the reason that you are put through this academy, the reason that your training goes on in the service is because without that training no man can hope to do the work that is set before you to do. It is equally true that the training can not be given you only from without unless you actively and earnestly seek to get the best possible benefit from it yourselves; that the best teachers, the best superiors can not supply wholly or more than in very small part the lack of that which is within you. No other body of men of your age in our country owes so much to the United States, to the flag that symbolizes this Nation, as you do. No other