In a month or so you can teach an enthusiastic man, who is fired by a big idea, all the discipline he needs for carrying out his duties and profiting by his opportunities, but you can't reverse the process and incite enthusiasms as a result of the application of discipline. Don't think that I want to minimize the merits of military discipline for military purposes. Of course, coördination and subordination are absolutely necessary in the handling of large bodies of men. Even the men in France who deserted to the front, as many of them did, no matter how much we may sympathize with their desire to get into the game, had to be disciplined. Someone had to stay behind and see to the supplies. The point we are discussing is the carrying over of this principle of military discipline intact into civilian life. So far as discipline brings about regularity of life, of exercise, so long as it ministers to alertness, we can use it, but as between discipline on the one hand, and initiative and team play on the other, to meet our academic or our national needs, I am for initiative and team play. Please don't misunderstand me. By reducing the present emphasis on external discipline, after childhood has been passed, I don't mean a lowering of standards. External discipline, it seems to me, is often really imposed as a substitute for high standards; something supposed to be just as good and more easy to keep in stock. The standards of the worth-while organization, and these are the outward expression of its aims, its ideals, ought to be high enough and intelligently enough administered to make sure that the men and women who are unable to provide their own discipline, should in the general interest be painlessly but promptly removed from the group. Here is a _credo_ for the American people, from the pen of a regular army officer. It's a pretty good one for an American University: "To foster individual talent, imagination and initiative, to couple with this a high degree of coöperation, and to subject these to a not too minute direction; the whole vitalized by a supreme purpose, which serves as the magic key to unlock the upper strata of the energies of men." * * * * * Finally, let me try to apply these lessons to you young men and women of the graduating class. Keep in good physical shape. Overwork is usually a combination of bad air, bad feeding, and lack of exercise and sleep. See that you don't go stale. If you lack the zest of life, find out what the trouble is; whether it is your teeth or your liver or your soul. Picture to yourself what Theodore Roosevelt got out of life.