Afoot in England | Page 5

personality
of the speaker made a marked impression upon his hearers; and after
his retirement from the hall in which the dinner was held, what he said
furnished almost the sole subject of animated conversation, until the
party separated. In Budapest, under the dome of the beautiful House of
Parliament, Count Apponyi, one of the great political leaders of 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 _blasé_ city kept up its interest
in him without abatement for eight days; but that a week after his
departure should still find him