CHAPTER XXXI. 



COLONEL ROOSEVELT'S SPEECH IN PARIS ON CITIZEN^ 



SHIP IN A REPUBLIC. 



COLONEIv ROOSEVELT on April 23 electrified France with 

 one of the most forceful speeches he has ever spoken. 



What Mr. Roosevelt said was interrupted again and again with 

 outbursts of applause. His speech was given over to defining the 

 duties of individual citzenship in a republic. He scorned the 

 sluggards, the cynics and the idle rich. 



He preached the gospel of work, of character and of the strenu- 

 ous life. He defined his attitude on the subject of human rights 

 and made clear his position in respect to the moneyed interests. 

 He commended the qualities of courage, honesty, sincerity and 

 common sense and said these qualities rather than genius were 

 essential. He made clear his belief that republican institutions 

 are still on trial, both in France and America. 



His address delivered in the Sorbonne, Paris, is as follows : 



" Strange and impressive associations rise in the mind of a man from the 

 New World who speaks before this angnst body in this ancient institution of 

 learning. Before his eyes pass the shadows of mighty kings and warlike 

 nobles, of great masters of law and theology; through the shining dust of the 

 dead centuries he sees crowded figures that tell of the power and learning and 

 splendor of times gone by; and he sees also the innumerable host of humble 

 students to whom clerkship meant emancipation, to whom it was well-nigh the 

 only outlet from the dark thraldom of the Middle Ages. 



" This was the most famous university of mediaeval Europe at a time 

 when no one dreamed that there was a New World to discover. Its services 

 to the cause of human knowledge already stretched far back into the remote 

 past at the time when my forefathers, three centuries ago, were among the 

 sparse bands of traders, plowmen, woodchoppers and fisherfolk who, in hard 

 struggle with the iron unfriendliness of the Indian-haunted land, were laying 

 the foundations of what has now become the giant republic of the West. 



" The pioneer days pass ; the stump-dotted clearings expand into vast 

 stretches of fertile farm land; the stockaded clusters of log cabins change into 

 towns ; the hunters of game, the tillers of the soil, the men who wander all 

 their lives long through the wilderness as the heralds and harbingers of an 

 oncoming civilization, themselves vanish before the civilization for which they 

 have prepared the way. 



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