272 BANQUET. 



all." It is the freedom that Germany had during times of peace to push her prows into every 

 port of every nation of the world, which she exercised, without let or hindrance, and in war, 

 "freedom of the seas" consisted of Gemiany's absolute right to push the prow of her 

 navy out of their hiding places on the North Sea, a "freedom of the seas" which she did 

 not exercise until she formed that long line the other day that ended up on the coast of 

 Scotland. In all seriousness, my friends, if the most scholastic brain of the century had 

 twenty-five years ago defined what the "freedom of the seas" then was, that definition 

 would not have protected us from the hellishness of the submarine. The best definition of 

 the freedom of the seas Germany got was the "made in Britain" sort, the freedom of the 

 seas that France and Italy learned to value and in the Peace Treaty they will not curtail. 



I don't want anyone to think I am not fond of definitions, for I am. The most inter- 

 esting book I know of — the one that has in it every word that ever was coined ; that has ever 

 been used in any other book ; the one that changes its subject more frequently than any 

 other — is a book on definitions, which was prepared some years ago by another Noah — 

 Webster, I think, was his last name. But I know when to use definitions and when not to 

 use them. Now some years ago, Mr. Carnegie, feeling that he might commit the crime of 

 dying a rich man, concluided to give several millions of his unearned increment to start a 

 hero fund, so he selected a number of us gentlemen in Pittsburgh to go into the business 

 of making heroes. It was a novel enterprise, and we had some very scholastic gentlemen 

 on our board who insisted that before we went into the hero business we must define what 

 a hero was. They said, and with a good deal of plausibility, that we could not award medals 

 and money and go into the hero business unless we had a clean-cut definition of what a hero 

 was. So the whole co^mmission started in to define what a hero was, and I have an idea, from 

 some of the efforts that were made, that if we had waited to get a hero actually defined we 

 would still have been engaged in the phantom definition search on which we started. But, 

 when Mr. X sent in a definition which dispensed with sesquipedalian, scholastic verbiage and, 

 descending to the vernacular of the common people, defined heroes as "butters in what gets 

 hurt," we stopped the definition business then and there and got down to the real thing. But, 

 seriously speaking, gentlemen, I want to say that the German nation complained that they 

 had not the "freedom of the seas" and that one of the justifications of their entering upon this 

 ■\var — what they were talking about over there in Germany when I saw and heard them — 

 wag that they were denied the "freedom of the seas." 



"Freedom of the Seas!" What is the "freedom of the seas," after all, in time of peace, 

 but the right of any man or any nation to take his ship, with the flag of his nation aloft, and 

 go into any port where he wants to trade and come out freely? Whoever heard of the "free- 

 dom of the seas" being denied to the Kaiser or to any one of his ships, or his empire? Who 

 has stood over there in Hamburg, the home city of those great German lines, and watched 

 the great kaleidoscopic map with those little German flags changed every day, telling that 

 German vessels all over the globe were poking their prows up the Yellow River, into Aus- 

 tralia, into Southampton, into New York, into Rio ; who can stand here to-day and say that 



