African and European Addresses. Roosevelt Theodore
upon his friends, or upon experts in the subject he is dealing with, for advice and suggestion.
Of the addresses collected in this volume, three—the lectures at the Sorbonne, at the University of Berlin, and at Oxford—were written during the winter of 1909, before Mr. Roosevelt left the Presidency; a fourth, the Nobel Prize speech, was composed during the hunting trip in Africa, and the original copy, written with indelible pencil on sheets of varying size and texture, and covered with interlineations and corrections, bears all the marks of life in the wilderness. The Cairo and Guildhall addresses were written and rewritten with great care beforehand. The remaining three, "Peace and Justice in the Sudan," "The Colonial Policy of the United States," and the speech at the University of Cambridge were extemporaneous. The Cairo and Guildhall speeches are on the same subject, and sprang from the same sources, and although one was delivered at the beginning, and the other at the close of a three months' journey, they should, in order to be properly understood, be read as one would read two chapters of one work.
When Mr. Roosevelt reached Egypt, he found the country in one of those periods of political unrest and religious fanaticism which have during the last twenty-five years given all Europe many bad quarters of an hour. Technically a part of the Ottoman Empire and a province of the Sultan of Turkey, Egypt is practically an English protectorate. During the quarter of a century since the tragic death of General Gordon at Khartum, Egypt has made astonishing progress in prosperity, in the administration of justice, and in political stability. All Europe recognizes this progress to be the fruit of English control and administration. At the time of Mr. Roosevelt's visit, a faction, or party, of native Egyptians, calling themselves Nationalists, had come into somewhat unsavory prominence; they openly urged the expulsion of the English, giving feverish utterance to the cry "Egypt for the Egyptians!" In Egypt, this cry means more than a political antagonism; it means the revival of the ancient and bitter feud between Mohammedanism and Christianity. It is in effect a cry of "Egypt for the Moslem!" The Nationalist party had by no means succeeded in affecting the entire Moslem population, but it had succeeded in attracting to itself all the adventurers, and lovers of darkness and disorder who cultivate for their own personal gain such movements of national unrest. The non-Moslem population, European and native, whose ability and intelligence is indicated by the fact that, while they form less than ten per cent. of the inhabitants, they own more than fifty per cent. of the property, were staunch supporters of the English control which the Nationalists wished to overthrow. The Nationalists, however, appeared to be the only people who were not afraid to talk openly and to take definite steps. Just before Mr. Roosevelt's arrival, Boutros Pasha, the Prime Minister, a native Egyptian Christian, and one of the ablest administrative officers that Egypt has ever produced, had been brutally assassinated by a Nationalist. The murder was discussed everywhere with many shakings of the head, but in quiet corners, and low tones of voice. Military and civil officers complained in private that the home government was paying little heed to the assassination and to the spirit of disorder which brought it about. English residents, who are commonly courageous and outspoken in great crises, gave one the impression of speaking in whispers in the hope that if it were ignored, the agitation might die away instead of developing into riot and bloodshed.
Now this way of dealing with a law-breaker and political agitator is totally foreign to Mr. Roosevelt; even his critics admit that he both talks and fights in the open. In two speeches in Khartum, one at a dinner given in his honor by British military and civil officers, and one at a reception arranged by native Egyptian military men and officials, he pointed out in vigorous language the dangers of religious fanaticism and the kind of "Nationalism" that condones assassination. Newspaper organs of the Nationalists attacked him for these speeches when he arrived in Cairo. This made him all the more determined to say the same things in Cairo when the proper opportunity came, especially as officials, both military and civil, of high rank and responsibility, had persistently urged him to do what he properly could to arouse the attention of the British Government to the Egyptian situation. The opportunity came in an invitation to address the University of Cairo. His speech was carefully thought out and was written with equal care; some of his friends, both Egyptian, and English, whom he consulted, were in the uncertain frame of mind of hoping that he would mention the assassination of Boutros, but wondering whether he really ought to do so. Mr. Roosevelt spoke with all his characteristic effectiveness of enunciation and gesture. He was listened to with earnest attention and vigorous applause by a representative audience of Egyptians and Europeans, of Moslems and Christians. The address was delivered on the morning of March 28th; in the afternoon the comment everywhere was, "Why haven't these things been said in public before?" Of course the criticisms of the extreme Nationalists were very bitter. Their newspapers, printed in Arabic, devoted whole pages to denunciations of the speech. They protested to the university authorities against the presentation of the honorary degree which was conferred upon Mr. Roosevelt; they called him "a traitor to the principles of George Washington," and "an advocate of despotism"; an orator at a Nationalist mass meeting explained that Mr. Roosevelt's "opposition to political liberty" was due to his Dutch origin, "for the Dutch, as every one knows, have treated their colonies more cruelly than any other civilized nation"; one paper announced that the United States Senate had recorded its disapproval of the speech by taking away Mr. Roosevelt's pension of five thousand dollars, in amusing ignorance of the fact that Mr. Roosevelt never had any pension of any kind whatsoever. On the other hand, government officers of authority united with private citizens of distinction (including missionaries, native Christians, and many progressive Moslems) in expressing, personally and by letter, approval of the speech as one that would have a wide influence in Egypt in supporting the efforts of those who are working for the development of a stable, just, and enlightened form of government. In connection with the more widely-known Guildhall address on the same subject it unquestionably has such an influence.
Between the delivery of the Cairo speech and that of the next fixed address, the lecture at the Sorbonne in Paris on April 23d, there were a number of extemporaneous and occasional addresses of which no permanent record has been, or can be made. Some of these were responses to speeches of welcome made by municipal officials on railway platforms, or were replies to toasts at luncheons and dinners. In Rome, Mayor Nathan gave a dinner in his honor in the Campidoglio, or City Hall, which was attended by a group of about fifty men prominent in Italian official or private life. On this occasion the Mayor read an address of welcome in French, to which Mr. Roosevelt made a reply touching upon the history of Italy and some of the social problems with which the Italian people have to deal in common with the other civilized nations of the earth. He began his reply in French, but soon broke off, and continued in English, asking the Mayor to translate it, sentence by sentence, into Italian for the assembled guests, most of whom did not speak English. Both the speech itself and the personality of the speaker made a marked impression upon his hearers; and after his retirement from the hall in which the dinner was held, what he said furnished almost the sole subject of animated conversation, until the party separated. In Budapest, under the dome of the beautiful House of Parliament, Count Apponyi, one of the great political leaders of modern Hungary, on behalf of the Hungarian delegates to the Inter-Parliamentary Union presented to Mr. Roosevelt an illuminated address in which was recorded the latter's achievements in behalf of human rights, human liberty, and international justice. Mr. Roosevelt in his reply showed an intimate familiarity with the Hungarian history such as, Count Apponyi afterwards said, he had never met in any other public man outside of Hungary. Although entirely extemporaneous, this reply may be taken as a fair exemplification of the spirit of all his speeches during his foreign journey. Briefly, in referring to some allusions in Count Apponyi's speech to the great leaders of liberty in the United States and in Hungary, he asserted that the principles for which he had endeavored to struggle during his political career were principles older than those of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln; older, indeed, than the principles of Kossuth, the great Hungarian leader; they were the principles enunciated in the Decalogue and the Golden Rule. One of the significant things about these sermons by Mr. Roosevelt—I call them sermons because he frequently himself uses the phrase, "I preach"—is that nobody spoke, or apparently thought the word cant in connection with them. They were accepted as the genuine and spontaneous expression of a man who believes that the highest moral principles are quite compatible with all the best social joys of life, and with dealing knockout blows when it is necessary to fight in order to redress wrongs or to maintain justice.
The people of