Mr. President and gentlemen, it is a very great pleasure for me to be
here to-day and to address you and to wear what the Secretary[10] has
called the gilded trappings which show that I am one of the youngest
living graduates of Cambridge. Something in the nature of a tract was
handed to me before I came up here. It was an issue of the _Gownsman_
[holding up, amid laughter, a copy of an undergraduate publication]
with a poem portraying the poet's natural anxiety lest I should preach
at him. Allow me to interpose an anecdote taken from your own hunting
field. A one-time Master of Foxhounds strongly objected to the
presence of a rather near-sighted and very hard-riding friend who at
times insisted on riding in the middle of the pack; and on one
occasion he earnestly addressed him as follows: "Mr. So and So, would
you mind looking at those two dogs, Ploughboy and Melody. They are
very valuable, and I really wish you would not jump on them." To which
his friend replied, with great courtesy: "My dear sir, I should be
delighted to oblige you, but unfortunately I have left my glasses at
home, and I am afraid they must take their chance." I will promise to
preach as little as I can, but you must take your chance, for it is
impossible to break the bad habit of a lifetime at the bidding of a
comparative stranger. I was deeply touched by the allusion to the lion
and the coat-of-arms. Before I reached London I was given to
understand that it was expected that when I walked through Trafalgar
Square, I should look the other way as I passed the lions.
[10] The Cambridge Union is the home of the well-known debating
society of the undergraduates of Cambridge University. To the
Vice-President, a member of Emmanuel College, the college of John
Harvard who founded Harvard University, was appropriately assigned
the duty of proposing the resolution admitting Mr. Roosevelt to
honorary membership in the Union Society. In supporting the
resolution the Vice-President referred to the peculiar relation
which unites the English Cambridge and the American Cambridge in a
common bond and touched upon Mr. Roosevelt's African exploits by
jocosely expressing anxiety for the safety of "the crest of my own
college, the Emmanuel Lion, which I see before me well within
range." There had just appeared in _Punch_, at the time of Mr.
Roosevelt's arrival in England, a full-page cartoon showing the
lions of the Nelson Monument in Trafalgar Square guarded by
policemen and protected by a placard announcing that "these lions
are not to be shot." The Secretary, in seconding the resolution,
humorously alluded to the doctor's gown, hood, and cap, in which
Mr. Roosevelt received his degree, as a possible example of what
America sometimes regards as the gilded trappings of a feudal and
reactionary Europe.--L.F.A.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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