An Address Delivered at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910


Strange and impressive associations rise in the mind of a man from the
New World who speaks before this august body in this ancient
institution of learning. Before his eyes pass the shadows of mighty
kings and warlike nobles, of great masters of law and theology;
through the shining dust of the dead centuries he sees crowded figures
that tell of the power and learning and splendor of times gone by; and
he sees also the innumerable host of humble students to whom clerkship
meant emancipation, to whom it was well-nigh the only outlet from the
dark thraldom of the Middle Ages.

This was the most famous university of mediæval Europe at a time when
no one dreamed that there was a New World to discover. Its services to
the cause of human knowledge already stretched far back into the
remote past at the time when my forefathers, three centuries ago,
were among the sparse bands of traders, plowmen, woodchoppers, and
fisherfolk who, in hard struggle with the iron unfriendliness of the
Indian-haunted land, were laying the foundations of what has now
become the giant republic of the West. To conquer a continent, to tame
the shaggy roughness of wild nature, means grim warfare; and the
generations engaged in it cannot keep, still less add to, the stores
of garnered wisdom which once were theirs, and which are still in the
hands of their brethren who dwell in the old land. To conquer the
wilderness means to wrest victory from the same hostile forces with
which mankind struggled in the immemorial infancy of our race. The
primeval conditions must be met by primeval qualities which are
incompatible with the retention of much that has been painfully