Extracts from Addresses 355
to find ourselves associated with the military representatives as your
guests. I hope we may take this as an augury that the two countries
are now associated both in matters of war and in matters of peace by
a bond which will never be broken. I hope, too, that the fact that we
are invited to meet the Chamber of Commerce in the City of Houston
is an indication that the old days, in which the business man suspected
the professor and the professor suspected the business man, and each
tried to persuade himself that he to some extent looked down upon the
other, have passed away, and that we are now able to meet together and
confer together on how we can best work together for the good of theworld.
I think you were justified perhaps, as business men, in suspecting the
professors on the war. Professors are people who are apt to make
prophecies, and when you remember that at the beginning of the war
all the political economists of the world, without exception, assured us
that no country would be able to stand the strain of a great world war
of this sort for more than six months, or at the most a year, and they
were all wrong, perhaps you were justified in suspecting them. But
please remember that the business men told us the same thing, and they
again were wrong, and I think for the same reason. I believe that
the theories, both of business men and of economists, were based upon
the premise, upon the supposition, that everything of activity in this
world was to be attributed to the spirit of competition, that we were all
scrambling for something and trying to get all we could. On that
assumption the war would have come to an end. But we are here to
represent, and I think this meeting here to-day also represents, that
the spirit of competition is to be replaced in the future by the spirit of
cooperation. Here in this city I think you are fully realizing the
advantage that a community gets by inviting the cooperation of its teach-
ers in the affairs of ordinary life, and an institution like the Rice Institute
is fully alive to the fact that you have got to invite the cooperation of
your business community in order to succeed as an educational institu-
tion. I know from what I have seen that the City of Houston has a
pride in the Rice Institute, and I know from what I have seen that the
Rice Institute takes pride in its city. The more each can give to the
other, the more each will get. It was at another luncheon of this sort,
when two men were passing through the vestibule and recovering their
coats, that one of them observed that the other, in receiving his coat
from the porter, gave the porter an uncommonly large gratuity of
something like ten dollars. As they went out he said: “My dear fellow,
what made you give that man that large tip?” To which his friend
replied, while displaying a handsome fur-lined overcoat: “Just look at
the overcoat he has given me.” I think you will find that in these