ЗЗб Extracts from Addresses
burden to themselves for the rest of their lives, a burden to their families,
a burden to the State. That is the sort of thing we see.
Now, we think, and our government thinks, that if we would get the
two nations to know each other better, the best way of doing it is through
the youth, and in talking about the youth one must not forget the ladies.
It won’t do to talk about the young men, without talking about the young
women. We hope and believe that many more young American men
and women will come to us; and we hope fervently that many more will
come from our islands westward across the Atlantic.
We cannot show them new, beautifully equipped buildings, such as
you have here. We cannot show them the luxurious quarters and dormi-
tories that you have here in the great universities. We can show you
old buildings, which certainly do make an impression on every one’s mind.
We have around the little town of Cambridge, some twelve flying fields,
each with a thousand men, and in each of those thousands, when I left,
four hundred were American mechanics. In our depleted and ruined
state we did what we could to give them a good time, and when they
were off for a holiday we used to give them dances, and used to show
them around the colleges, and occasionally we gave them baseball
matches. I remember showing a party around once when a young boy
from Georgia, with a sweet soft Georgian voice that I only wish I had,
said to me at the end: “We never knew, sir, that such buildings could
exist.”
We can also introduce you to great men. There are still leaders of
thought, leaders of writing, great painters, some poets, and leading men
of science, who are not in any way commercialized, men who are content
to make a discovery and let the exploiters of this world exploit it com-
mercially. Those we have, and those we want your young men and your
young women to come over and see and know.
Your President has referred to us as not only men of some academic
standing, but as men of business ability. That reminds me that such
business ability as I have, and the much greater business ability of Sir
Henry Miers, if we were not in Houston, would probably be occupied
in holding an election, and I would probably be sitting hour after hour
receiving various documents and occasionally interviewing a candidate,
who wishes to get a vote, and trying, in my utter ignorance of anything
to do with such things, to settle disputes, probably laying up for me a
large number of actions at law; because, ladies and gentlemen, this is
the first time that women have ever had a vote. As I understand it—I
don’t know much about it; I have been wholly indifferent about it—they
have a vote if they are over thirty. Now, that raises all sorts of very
awkward questions, so that you cannot be surprised when I tell you how