Afoot in England | Page 5

modern Hungary, on behalf of the Hungarian delegates to the Inter-Parliamentary Union presented to Mr. Roosevelt an illuminated address in which was recorded the latter's achievements in behalf of human rights, human liberty, and international justice. Mr. Roosevelt in his reply showed an intimate familiarity with the Hungarian history such as, Count Apponyi afterwards said, he had never met in any other public man outside of Hungary. Although entirely extemporaneous, this reply may be taken as a fair exemplification of the spirit of all his speeches during his foreign journey. Briefly, in referring to some allusions in Count Apponyi's speech to the great leaders of liberty in the United States and in Hungary, he asserted that the principles for which he had endeavored to struggle during his political career were principles older than those of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln; older, indeed, than the principles of Kossuth, the great Hungarian leader; they were the principles enunciated in the Decalogue and the Golden Rule. One of the significant things about these sermons by Mr. Roosevelt--I call them sermons because he frequently himself uses the phrase, "I preach"--is that nobody spoke, or apparently thought the word cant in connection with them. They were accepted as the genuine and spontaneous expression of a man who believes that the highest moral principles are quite compatible with all the best social joys of life, and with dealing knockout blows when it is necessary to fight in order to redress wrongs or to maintain justice.
The people of Paris are perhaps as quick to detect and to laugh at cant or moral platitudes as anybody of the modern world. And yet the Sorbonne lecture, delivered by invitation of the officials of the University of Paris, on April 23d, saturated as it was with moral ideas and moral exhortation, was a complete success. The occasion furnished an illustration of the power of moral ideas to interest and to inspire. The streets surrounding the hall were filled with an enormous crowd long before the hour announced for the opening of the doors; and even ticket-holders had great difficulty in gaining admission. The spacious amphitheatre of the Sorbonne was filled with a representative audience, numbering probably three thousand people. Around the hall, were statues of the great masters of French intellectual life--Pascal, Descartes, Lavoisier, and others. On the wall was one of the Puvis de Chavannes's most beautiful mural paintings. The group of university officials and academicians on the dais, from which Mr. Roosevelt spoke, lent to the occasion an appropriate university atmosphere. The simple but perfect arrangement of the French and American flags back of the speaker suggested its international character.
The speech was an appeal for moral rather than for intellectual or material greatness. It was received with marked interest and approval; the passage ending with a reference to "cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat," was delivered with real eloquence, and aroused a long-continued storm of applause. With characteristic courage, Mr. Roosevelt attacked race suicide when speaking to a race whose population is diminishing, and was loudly applauded. Occasionally with quizzical humor he interjected an extemporaneous sentence in French, to the great satisfaction of his audience. A passage of peculiar interest was the statement of his creed regarding the relation of property-rights to human rights; it was not in his original manuscript but was written on the morning of the lecture as the result of a discussion of the subject of vested interests with one or two distinguished French publicists. He first pronounced this passage in English, and then repeated it in French, enforced by gestures which so clearly indicated his desire to have his hearers unmistakably understand him in spite of defective pronunciation of a foreign tongue that the manifest approval of the audience was expressed in a curious mingling of sympathetic laughter and prolonged and serious applause.
A fortnight after the Sorbonne address, I received from a friend, an American military officer living in Paris who knows well its general habit of mind, a letter from which I venture to quote here, because it so strikingly portrays the influence that Mr. Roosevelt exerted as an orator during his European journey:
I find that Paris is still everywhere talking of Mr. Roosevelt. It was a thing almost without precedent that this _blas��_ city kept up its interest in him without abatement for eight days; but that a week after his departure should still find him the main topic of conversation is a fact which has undoubtedly entered into Paris history. The Temps [one of the foremost daily newspapers of Paris] has had fifty-seven thousand copies of his Sorbonne address printed and distributed free to every schoolteacher in France and to many other persons. The Socialist or revolutionary groups and press had made preparations for a monster