COLONEL ROOSEVELT IN ENGLAND. 



He said : " An American who, in response to such an invitation as I 

 have received, speaks in this university of ancient renown cannot 

 but feel with pecuHar vividness the interest and charm of his sur- 

 roundings, fraught as they are with a thousand associations. Your 

 great universities, and all the memories that make them great, are 

 living realities in the minds of thousands of men who have never 

 seen them and who dwell across the seas in other lands. Moreover, 

 these associations are no stronger in the men of English stock than 

 in those who are not. 



" My people have been for eight generations in America ; but 

 in one thing I am like the Americans of to-morrow rather than like 

 the many of the Americans of to-day, for I have in my veins the 

 blood of men who came from many different European races. The 

 athnic make-up of our people is slowly changing, so that constantly 

 the race tends to become more and more akin to that of those 

 Americans who, like myself, are of the old stock but not mainly of 

 English stock. 



MUTUAL RESPECT, UNDERSTANDING AND SYMPATHY. 



" Yet I think that, as time goes by, mutual respect, understand- 

 ing, and sympathy among the English-speaking peoples grow 

 greater and not less. Any of my ancestors, Hollander or Hugue- 

 not, Scotchman or Irishman, who had come to Oxford in ' the spac- 

 ious days of great Queen Elizabeth,' would have felt far more 

 alien than I, their descendant, now feel. Common heirship in the 

 things of the spirit makes a closer bond than common heirship in 

 things of the body. 



" More than ever before in the world's history, we of to-day 

 seek to penetrate the causes of the mysteries that surround not only 

 mankind but all life, both in the present and the past. We search, 

 we peer, we see things dimly ; here and there we get a ray of clear 

 vision as we look before and after. 



" We study the tremendous procession of the ages, from the 

 immemorial past when in ' cramp elf and saurian forms ' the creative 

 forces ' swathed their too-much power,' down to the yesterday, a 



