degree of LL.D. His address on this occasion was not, like the Romanes
lecture at Oxford, a part of the academic ceremony connected with the
conferring of the honorary degree. It was spoken to an audience of
undergraduates when, after the academic exercises in the Senate House,
he was elected to honorary membership in the Union Society, the
well-known Cambridge debating club which has trained some of the best
public speakers of England. At Oxford the doctors and dignitaries
cracked the jokes--in Latin--while the undergraduates were highly
decorous. At Cambridge, on the other hand, the students indulged in
the traditional pranks which often lend a color of gaiety to
University ceremonies at both Oxford and Cambridge. Mr. Roosevelt
entered heartily into the spirit of the undergraduates, and it was
evident that they, quite as heartily, liked his understanding of the
fact that the best university and college life consists in a judicious
mixture of the grave and the gay. The honor which these undergraduates
paid to their guest was seriously intended, was admirably planned,
and its genuineness was all the more apparent because it had a note of
pleasantry. Mr. Roosevelt spoke as a university student to university
students and what he said, although brief, extemporaneous, and even
unpremeditated, deserves to be included with his more important
addresses, because it affords an excellent example of his
characteristic habit of making an occasion of social gaiety also an
occasion of expressing his belief in the fundamental moral principles
of social and political life. The speech was frequently interrupted by
the laughter and applause of the audience, and the theory which Mr.
Roosevelt propounded, that any man in any walk of life may achieve
genuine success simply by developing ordinary qualities to a more than
ordinary degree, was widely quoted and discussed by the press of Great
Britain.