332 Extracts from Addresses
welcoming to the college campus of this community. And he makes the
welcome in the same spirit in which he read the Declaration of Indepen-
dence, a document that has more lately dissolved into a Declaration of
Interdependence between Britain and America. Nature made us kinsmen;
the ancient truth, pity, justice, and hardiness of our race has again made
us freemen. It is in that spirit of comradeship, kinship, and reunion—
a spirit, through the burning events of the intervening years, reconse-
crated by the blood and suffering of brave men, resanctified by the tears
and sacrifice of brave women—that I welcome you in the name of the
Founder, and on behalf of the Trustees, Faculty, and students of this
new foundation. My only regret is that we are not all at home1 to
greet you. Our professor of English is National Secretary of the
American Red Cross, loaned to that organization for the duration of the
war; our professor of French is in the American Army on the Western
Front; our professor.of German is with the American Forces on the
Western Front; our professor of mathematics is on the Italian Front;
our professor of physics is engaged in work of research in an experi-
mental laboratory of the United States Navy; our assistant professor of
biology is on the Italian Front; our assistant professor of chemistry is
in charge of a government laboratory with sixty researchers under him;
our assistant professor of mathematics is with the ordnance department;
our assistant professor of physical education is directing the athletic
activities of Camp Logan; our assistant professor of physics is off the
coast of England with a crew of thirty men; in addition, some ten or a
dozen junior members are on leaves of absence in government service.
And, moreover, despite the fact that we began only in the autumn of 1912,
and then with a single class of fifty-nine members, one-third of whom
were women, and year by year have added a class annually, with men
and women in that same proportion, it was possible to announce at
the matriculation assembly of this last autumn, 1918, that there were
already four hundred2 stars on our student service flag, and four hundred
other men on the grounds preparing for officers’ commissions. Further-
1 Under normal conditions these visiting gentlemen would have found
several of their countrymen among the resident members of the Rice Insti-
tute, inasmuch as the first appointments to its faculty included a Fellow of
the Royal Society and of Trinity College, a Lecturer of Balliol and Newdi-
gate Prizeman, a Senior Wrangler and Rayleigh Prizeman; and later ap-
pointments have included a Master of Arts of the National University of
Ireland, and a MacKinnon Scholar of the Royal Society and Doctor of Sci-
ence of Liverpool; while its own first doctorate in philosophy has lately been
conferred upon an English holder of one of its first fellowships in mathe-
matics.
2 In the meantime the record, however still incomplete, has gone to more
than seven hundred.