EXTRACTS FROM REMARKS MADE ON
VARIOUS PUBLIC OCCASIONS1 DURING
THE RICE INSTITUTE VISIT OF THE
BRITISH EDUCATIONAL MISSION
I
AT THE RECEPTION OF THE MISSION IN THE FACULTY
CHAMBER OF THE RICE INSTITUTE, MONDAY,
NOVEMBER 25, 1918, ɪɪ:oo A.M.
RESIDENT LOVETT: At a patriotic celebration held in the City
auditorium of Houston on the fourth day of July, 1913, a citizen
of this community, reading to the assembly the unanimous declaration
of the thirteen original United States of America, said that he was
reading the document in the spirit of the men who, that very morning,
gathered around a common camp fire on an old battlefield farther north,
under the stars and bars of the Confederacy and the stars and stripes
of the Union, were interlining “Dixie” with “Yankee Doodle” in the
confusion of their tears, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the
battle of Gettysburg; reading in the spirit which would that very
evening bring together in the capital of the British Empire Britons and
Americans around a common board under the Union Jack and the Star
Spangled Banner to sing as heartily and lustily “God Save the King” and
“America”; reading in the spirit of that remarkable resolution adopted
by the British House of Commons on the signing of the provisional
articles of the Treaty of Paris in 1782, when, their offspring, their
dearest child, in alliance with their bitterest enemies having successfully
revolted against them, they put on record their “most ardent wish that
religion, language, interests, and affection may yet prove a bond of
permanent union between the two countries.”
A group of distinguished scholars from England, Ireland, Scotland,
and Wales, that same citizen has this morning the rare privilege of
1 See the Rice Institute Pamphlet, Vol. V, No. 4, October, 1918, pp.
339-248, for the programmes of visits to the Rice Institute in November and
December, 1918, respectively from the British Educational Mission, and from
the Official Mission of French Scholars, to the universities of the United
States.
33i