nd
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 Paris are perhaps as quick to detect and to laugh at
cant or moral platitudes as anybody of the modern world. And yet the
Sorbonne lecture, delivered by invitation of the officials of the
University of Paris, on April 23d, saturated as it was with moral
ideas and moral exhortation, was a complete success. The occasion
furnished an illustration of the power of moral ideas to interest and
to inspire. The streets surrounding the hall were filled with an
enormous crowd long before the hour announced for the opening of