“Then there is the romance of this very city. On the first day of my arrival, I inquired for the highest building and I ascended it in an elevator--at least they assured me it was an elevator. I thought at first that I had wandered into the dynamite gun. If a man can look down from that point, upon the noble bridge, upon the two rivers crowded with shipping, and upon the magnificent city with its thousand evidences of energy and prosperity, and can afterward find nothing better than a sneer to carry back with him across the ocean, he ought to consult a doctor. His heart must be too hard or his head too soft. And no less wonderful to me are those Western cities, which, without any period of development, seem to spring straight into a full growth of every modern convenience, but where, even among the rush of cable cars and the ringing of telephone bells, one seems still to catch the echoes of the woodsman’s axe and of the scout’s rifle. These things are the romance of America, the romance of change, of contrast, of danger met and difficulty overcome; and let me say that we, your kinsmen upon the other side, exult in your success and in your prosperity, and it is those who know British feeling, true British feeling best, who will best understand how true are my words. I hope you don’t think I say this, or that I express my admiration for your country, merely because I am addressing an American audience. Those who know me better on the other side will exonerate me from so unworthy a motive. It is a subject upon which I feel deeply. I am aware that the division of opinion among us at the time of your civil troubles has been taken to mean lack of sympathy with you. Far from being so, it was exactly the contrary. Our sympathies are so close and vital that when you are rent in two we are rent in two, and with a bitterness and completeness which was the counterpart of your own. So it would be to-morrow, and when it ceases to be, it will be a proof that we have finally lost touch with you. It is only when a great American or an Englishman dies, when a mighty voice is hushed forever, a Tennyson, a Lowell, or a Holmes, that a thrill through both countries tells of that deep-lying race feeling in the development of which lies, I believe, the future history of the world. Little waves and eddies may disturb the surface, but there is an unseen current there a thousand fathoms deep, which sweeps us onward to the same goal. And the proudest thought of a literary man is that he, too, in his infinitesimal way, is one of the forces which make for unity of feeling amongst the English-speaking races, and for that ‘peace and good will to all men’ which such a unity of feeling would entail. “Gentlemen, I thank you once more for your great kindness to me.” President Seth Low of Columbia University, Hon. Abram S. Hewitt, W. Bourke Cockran, David Christie Murray, Bartow S. Weeks, and William H. McElroy also spoke.