Press Club: I do not remember to have agreed or consented to make any remarks about the press or anything else on the present occasion, but I am glad of this opportunity to say a word or two. Of course, I have the very greatest respect for this profession, the profession of the press, knowing it, as I do, to be one of the greatest civilizers of the world. Above all other institutions and all other influences, it is the greatest agency in breaking down the hedges of provincialism. In olden times one nation had no knowledge or understanding of another nation, and no insight or understanding into its life; and, indeed, various parts of one nation held the other parts of it somewhat in the attitude of hostility, because of a lack of more thorough knowledge; and, curiously enough, we are prone to look upon strangers more or less in the light of enemies. Indeed, enemy and stranger in the old vocabularies are pretty much of the same significance. A stranger was an enemy. I think it is Darwin who alludes to the instinctive fear a child has of a stranger as one of the heritages of centuries of instinctive cultivation, the handed-down instinct of years ago. And even now it is a fact that we have very little sympathy with people of a different country, even people speaking the same language, having the same god with a different name, or another god with the same name, recognizing the same principles of right and wrong. But the moment people began to trade with each other, the moment they began to enjoy the results of each other's industry and brain, the moment that, through this medium, they began to get an insight into each other's life, people began to see each other as they were; and so commerce became the greatest of all missionaries of civilization, because, like the press, it tended to do away with provincialism. You know there is no one else in the world so egotistic as the man who knows nothing. No man is more certain than the man who knows nothing. The savage knows everything. The moment man begins to be civilized he begins to appreciate how little he knows, how very circumscribed in its very nature human knowledge is. Now, after commerce came the press. From the Moors, I believe, we learned the first rudiments of that art which has civilized the world. With the invention of movable type came an easy and cheap method of preserving the thoughts and history of one generation to another and transmitting the life of one nation to another. Facts became immortal, and from that day to this the intelligence of the world has rapidly and steadily increased. And now, if we are provincial, it is our own fault, and if we are hateful and odious and circumscribed and narrow and peevish and limited in the light we get from the known universe, it is our own fault.