There is only one of my fellow-citizens to whom I will touch my hat quicker than to the soldier; and that is the mother, because I think she has a little harder time of it. The mother who has brought up as they should be brought up a family of young children is entitled to such respect as no other person in the community is entitled to. When the end of her life comes she has endured any amount of hardship, the sitting up by beds of sick children, the endless taking care of them, for a mother is not allowed to know the difference between night and day as far as the ending of the day’s task is concerned; but, after all, when her life is done she can look back upon it with a prouder sense of satisfaction than any one else, if she has done her duty, for her children and her husband shall rise up and call her blessed. The worthy life for the Nation, for the individual, for the man, for the woman, is the life of effort for the things worth striving for; and our whole aim should be not to teach those who are to come after us to shirk difficulties, and to strive to have an easy time in life, but to strive to do their duty, whether that duty is hard or not, and to feel that no success is so great as the success of duty worth doing which is well done. Of course, that is my conception of the life for the Nation as well as for the individual. I am not going to develop my theory about that; in the first place, because I want to keep clear of anything that you might think touched in the faintest degree upon politics, and in the next place because I believe you know pretty well how I feel anyway. I feel that this Nation, whether it wishes to or not, can not help being a great Nation. You of Texas by what your forefathers did and what you have done have helped in making this Nation so that it is impossible not to be great. We can not decide whether we will be great or not. The only thing we can decide is whether, being great, we will do well or do ill. We have got our duty in the world. We must do our duty to others, and we must do our duty to ourselves. We must so handle ourselves that no weak power which is behaving itself shall have cause to fear us; and no strong power of any kind shall be able to oppress or wrong us. We all believe in the Monroe Doctrine. I have a little difficulty in getting some of my friends to accept my interpretation of it; but they will in time, because that interpretation has come to stay. We are building the Panama Canal. While that will be a benefit to all the country, it will be of most benefit to the Gulf States. We have duties in connection with the great position we have taken. We can not shirk these duties. We can do them well or do them ill, but do them we must That is one reason why I want to see a good navy; and we have got a good navy. I am going to use a simile that I used a couple of nights ago at Dallas. In the old days in Texas I understand that there used to