BANQUET. 341 



and the other was to electric-weld this cast-iron head. We cast a new head, but it was 

 defective, because it was beyond the capacity of my furnace. Then we electric-welded the 

 head and the ship came home with the President with the cast-iron head welded — welded in 

 seventeen places. (Applause.) 



Anybody who thinks that welding is not to be depended upon had better get off the 

 track, because welding is going to take a lot of your troubles off your hands. You do not 

 believe it, probably, but there is no question about it, with proper welding equipment (and 

 you can get it in the United States better than anywhere else in the world) and with proper 

 supei-vision, you can use welding in the strength members of vessels with perfect safety. 



There is one ship going to sea in the United States Navy today with 85 frames elec- 

 trically welded. She was smashed abroad, and that was the only way to get the repairs 

 done. The first thing she did was to get in a gale and get a terrible battering, and not a 

 sign of any weakness showed up in the welding. 



My next job was the Bridgeport, the repair ship. I took her to France. A German 

 submarine fired a shot at her, but the torpedo missed her by a narrow margin. When we 

 arrived there the work of repairing torpedo boats went on, and after that we took over 

 the care of the cargo steamers (you know that all the atrocities were not committed by the 

 Germans in Belgium and France; some of them were committed in shipyards in the United 

 States). Some of the shipyards used palpitating bulkheads in the ships, and if they got an 

 especially weak bulkhead, they loved to put the auxiliary machinery on the bulkhead, so 

 that the bulkhead would work and the machinery would not. Some of them used a curve of 

 sines as bedplates for engines. In the case of one ship, I had to bore each bearing to a dif- 

 ferent offset and then make drawings of these bearings and their offsets, so that the next 

 time they put in a bearing they would know how to place it. We ripped the turbines out 

 of the ship, realigned shafting, put the turbines back and sent the ship home. 



The Murray had 70 per cent of her keel carried away. When she came in, we rebuilt 

 the hull and sent her home. 



The great advantage about the work over there was the fact that you were absolutely 

 left alone. There was nobody to say "You cannot do this" or "You cannot do that." We 

 had to get the ships back. We were allowed to lay our own plans and go ahead and finish 

 them, and the day the Bridgeport left the port of Brest there was not a tug or lighter or 

 ship that was not fully repaired, and everything that carried the United States flag was out 

 of Brest three days after we left — we did a complete job. (Applause.) 



Just a word more. I would like to refer to a matter that the president spoke of earlier 

 in the evening. It impressed itself on my mind all the time I was in Europe. It was this — 

 that we stand to get nothing out of the war except a higher conception of governmental 

 affairs; but if we get that, if the individual citizen knows and appreciates his responsibili- 

 ties for his government and the way it is run ; if he appreciates the fact that going to the 

 polls once in four years is not the full service that the citizen owes his government; that if 

 he appreciates, when any law is passed, that he is a part in this government and becomes re- 



