It is nearly ten years ago that I first took dinner here in the immediate neighborhood of where I am dining now, and at that time, I remember perfectly, when I was first brought up here, it was by Mr. Jacob Riis and Mr. Jim Reynolds, and I was told that I would get a very good dinner and hear some very good music, and both prophecies proved true. It was about that time that I grew to be acquainted with so many of my hosts and fellow-guests of this evening. Others I had known before. With one of my fellow-guests, General Grant, I was then working, and at different times I spoke at meetings presided over or held in the clubhouses of various of the gentlemen here present, sometimes on political subjects, much more often on matters of good citizenship affecting us all as good citizens. I grew in those years, gentlemen, to have a very close feeling of sympathy and affection and regard for the men and women of the great East Side of this city. I needed no urging when I was invited to come and be a guest at a club of the East Side this evening. President Braun has described how the preliminary invitation took place. It was six years ago that this club gave me a dinner after I had been elected Governor, and they then said that they “intended to elect me President and that I must then come and take dinner with them again.” I told them that if they would carry out their part of the contract I would carry out my part. I am not perfectly certain that they anticipated that their offer would be closed with so soon, but you see, gentlemen, I have closed with it. To-night I wish to greet you most warmly and to say that I doubt if we could find a more typically American gathering than this, for Americanism is not a matter of birthplace, of ancestry, of creed, of occupation. Americanism is a matter of the spirit that is within, of a man’s soul. From the time when we first became an independent Nation to the present moment there has never been a generation in which some of our most distinguished and most useful men were not born on the other side of the Atlantic. It is peculiarly appropriate, and to me peculiarly pleasant that, in addressing this club of the men upon whose efforts so much of the future welfare of this city, of this State, of this Nation, depends, I should be addressing men who show by their actions that they know no difference between Jew and Gentile, Catholic and Protestant, native-born and foreign-born, provided only that the man, whatever his creed, whatever his birthplace, strives to live so as to do his full duty by his neighbor and by the community as a whole.