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Show The Significance of It. We urged the sending of the boys to San Francisco to seo the warships, the ocean, the fortro'sses that keep their iron watch at the entrance en-trance of the Golden Gate and at Alcatras; the great merchant ships that use the broad Pacific as a ferry and are the connecting link between the young Republic and the ancient despotisms beyond the sea. We urged that the boys might go, that their horizons might bo expanded, that they might gain a clearer idea of what native land really means, a deeper insiglit Into what1 American citizenship should be, a clearer vision of what the flag really symbolizes. We wanted, too, that they should receive the object lesson of how necessary discipline is to enable men to accomplish ac-complish great results. We thought they would be Impressed when they saw how the work on a battleship is carried on, the working of men like machinery; whether passing coal, or standing by their engines, or behind the great guns, that they might obtain a glimpse at least of what it is when in those steel casements those men go out to battle for the flag and for the land over which that flag waves. We thought it would be worth two years of ordinary schooling; we think so still. Those lads will have a clearer idea of what they must be to All rightly their place as American Ameri-can citizens, and how shameful it would be for them after seeing what they will see on this brief visit, to ever do a dishonorable act. There was "a special need of it. It is not much in tho Bast for boys to make a journey to the sea shore. Here are grown men who never saw a battleship; to whom the great moving world in the centers wher men congregate, are sealed books, and who perforce must be provincial provin-cial in many of their ideas. We look sometimes upon a panorama that depicts de-picts the main features of a great event, or upon a moving picture " at depicts the stages of a journey. The reverse ought to be the rule of our people. If possible they should all see the big wheat fields of the Dakotas, tho cotton fields of Texas, tho rice and sugar fields of Louisiana, the groat stool works of Pennsylvania, the immense spinning mills of Massachusetts, and the shi'ps that go and como from and to our ports. And tho boys of the East should early see how gold and silver and copper and load are mined, and through what processes they are reduced to commercial com-mercial form, and those boys of the East should arly come West and see the desert and the mountains, and before their provincialism be- comes fixed, learn how marvelous and majestic "H our country is, and realize that all our people 'H should be homogeneous,' and never for a moment take up the idea that to be born and reared in H any section gives to any man or people any claim to superiority. H For four years Theodore Roosevelt was about H the ablest President tliat ever presided over this H nation. Our belief is that the reason can be H found in the fact that when he left the university H he took his post-graduate course on the plains H and in the mountains of the West, and learned H to know his countrymen. Had he, when he grad- H uated, gone at once to Europe and spent three H years there, the chances are a hundred to one H that, with his nature, he would have been half H spoiled, and never great. Books and schools are H great things, but they are both inventions of H men. There were great souls long before either H was invented. Men wrought immortality whose jH only schooling was in Nature's great school and H in contact with their fellow men. H Tho boys will be the better for their visit to H the coast. It ought to givo them increased self- respect and increased consideration for tho rights of others, and ought to impres's upon them the H necessity of order and obedience to law; and if H twenty or forty years hence, any of these boys M rdfcCPgr eminent services performed in' any honorable capacity become distinguished, wo predict M that if asked what tho impelling forces were M behind their natural ambition, they will answer M that the one thing that in their youth H caused them to realize what course of life H they must pursue to finally honorably succeed H was their visit to San Francisco to see tho fleet of battleships and to givo them the first glimpse M of the majesty of their native land and tho sig- M nificance of her flag. M |