y and morality.
Let each man here make his weight felt in supporting a truly American
policy, a policy which decrees that we shall be free and shall hold our
own in the face of other nations, but which decrees also that we shall
be just, and that the peoples whose administration we have taken over
shall have their condition made better and not worse by the fact that
they have come under our sway.

LORD ROSEBERY

(ARCHIBALD PHILIP PRIMROSE)

PORTRAIT AND LANDSCAPE PAINTING

[Speech of Lord Rosebery at the annual banquet of the Royal
Academy, London, May 5, 1894. Sir Frederic Leighton, President of
the Royal Academy, was in the chair, and in proposing "The Health
of Her Majesty's Ministers," to which Lord Rosebery replied, he
said: "No function could be more lofty, no problem is more complex
than the governance of our Empire, so vast and various in land and
folk as that which owns the sceptre of the Queen. No toast,
therefore, claims a more respectful reception than that to which I
now invite your cordial response--the health of the eminent
statesmen in whose hands that problem lies--Her Majesty's
Ministers. And not admiration only for high and various endowments,
but memories also of a most sparkling speech delivered twelve
months ago at this table, sharpens the gratification with which I
call for response on the brilliant statesman who heads Her
Majesty's Government, the Earl of Rosebery."]

YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESS, MY LORDS, AND GENTLEMEN: No one, I think,
can respond unmoved for the first time in such an assembly as this in
the character in which I now stand before you. You have alluded, sir, to
the speech which I delivered here last year. But I have to confess with
a feeling of melancholy that since that period I have made a change for
the worse. [Laughter.] I have had to exchange all those dreams of
imagination to which I then alluded, which are, I believe, the proper
concomitants of the Foreign Office intelligently wielded, and which, I
have no doubt, my noble friend on my right sees in imagination as I did
then--I have had to exchange all those dreams for the dreary and
immediate prose of life--all the more dreary prose because a great deal
of it is my own.

[Illustration: _LORD ROSEBERY_

(_ARCHIBALD PHILIP PRIMROSE_)

_Photogravure after a photograph from life_]

There is one function, however, which has already devo