Extracts from Addresses 337
thankful I am for being at Rice Institute, instead of presiding over a
Parliamentary election.
The institution over which I preside, as you all realize, embraces more
than one college, and all these colleges have a certain friendly rivalry
in their prosperity, their size, what they can do for their men, and so on.
Now, for years, fifty, sixty or seventy years, one college at Cambridge
has been absolutely the most predominant. It is richer, far richer, in
its buildings and number of staff than any two or three of the others put
together. Yet this morning I got a copy of a Cambridge newspaper, a
university journal, which informed me that in my absence—possibly due
to my absence—my college, which is one of the poorest, has become con-
siderably the largest in Cambridge. It is more than twice the size of
Trinity. Well, if I had stayed in England that might not have happened.
So I have again cause for congratulating myself for being at Rice
Institute.
I must not detain you longer. I would like to give you some descrip-
tion of what has been happening to our young men, but after all, it is
very much the same as has happened to yours, only it has gone on longer
with us. I might perhaps remind you that Douglas Haig is what you
call a college man, being a graduate of the University of Oxford. Of
course, that is comparatively rare, because our officers in the professional
army are not turned out at the older universities as a rule. They are
caught too young. General Smuts, as great a statesman as he is a soldier,
was a pupil of my own at Christ College in Cambridge, and in the last
twelve months I have had two singular distinctions. One was that I
conferred a degree upon your ambassador, Mr. Walter Hines Page, who
came down to receive it, and on General Smuts at the same time. I re-
member now how Smuts referred to the American ambassador and said:
“I, General Smuts, represent a nation that fought against Great Britain
for liberty and lost. You, sir, represent a nation that fought against
Great Britain for liberty and won. And between us” (pointing to the
Vice-Chancellor) “is a gentleman who represents both the vanquished and
the victor.”
Since then I have had the great honor of conferring a degree upon the
President of the United States. If I had known of his intention of pro-
ceeding to the Peace Conference, I think I should have postponed that
conferment, because it has never before happened in the history of Cam-
bridge that a degree has been given to anybody in his absence, and if I
had known he was contemplating coming over, I should have tried to
have got him down to Cambridge and done the thing in the good old-
fashioned way.
I will end my rather discursive remarks again with a note of thanks