“Courtesy also can be tried by general agreeableness. During my tour--and owing to the arduous exercise of my friend, Major Pond, I have never stayed long in one place--I have travelled far and wide and haven’t always been able to ride in parlor cars. I have, consequently, seen a great deal of people; but with the exception of one single person, and she was an immigrant, and, I have no doubt, a delightful woman, although somewhat indifferent as to her personal appearance, with the exception of that single individual, I have met no woman and no man in the cars with whom I would not be willing to sit in the same compartment or the same seat of the car during a day’s journey. That seems to me a remarkable thing, but it may seem to you nothing. To us, from an European standpoint, it means a great deal. It means the comfort of your people; it means the self-respect of your people; it means the manners of your people; it means many things on which I congratulate you as a nation. (Applause.) “And, sir, what has interested me deeply is that while you are contending with the difficulties which fall to the lot, not only of a new and growing people, but of a nation into which is flowing the very refuse of Europe, there is throughout your people a great love of letters and of art. I have seen again and again in the houses of men who are, as they say in Europe, self-made, great evidence that their love is not set merely on the things that a man holds in his hand, but on the means of culture through which we see into the unseen and the beautiful. Some of the most lovely pictures which can possibly be obtained now are contained in the houses of those men. They do not have their pictures, gentlemen, merely as pieces of furniture, which they have bought for so much money, but the men who have them, as I can bear testimony, are men who can appreciate the beauty of those pictures and who are in no mean degree art critics. On the other side I have been assured that if a bookseller has a rare book, one of those lovely books that we all like to have, with a creamy and beautiful binding like that of the past, and marked, perhaps, with a king’s or a pope’s arms, it is not in England that he finds a purchaser, but in America. And, Mr. President, I would congratulate you on the fact that to your high spirit and great enterprise you are also adding a love of the past, and especially that love of letters and art which are surely the height of perfection. (Applause.)