The President says that this is New England doctrine.  So it is.  It is Dutch doctrine, too.  It is the doctrine of sound Americanism, the doctrine of common sense and common morality.  I am an expansionist.  I am glad we have acquired the islands we have acquired.  I am not a bit afraid of the responsibilities which we have incurred; but neither am I blind to how heavy those responsibilities are.  In closing my speech, I ask each of you to remember that he cannot shove the blame on others entirely, if things go wrong.  This is a government by the people, and the people are to blame ultimately if they are misrepresented, just exactly as much as if their worst passions, their worst desires are represented; for in the one case it is their supineness that is represented exactly as in the other case it is their vice.  Let each man here strive to make his weight felt on the side of decency and morality.  Let each man here make his weight felt in supporting a truly American policy, a policy which decrees that we shall be free and shall hold our own in the face of other nations, but which decrees also that we shall be just, and that the peoples whose administration we have taken over shall have their condition made better and not worse by the fact that they have come under our sway.

LORD ROSEBERY

(ARCHIBALD PHILIP PRIMROSE)

PORTRAIT AND LANDSCAPE PAINTING

[Speech of Lord Rosebery at the annual banquet of the Royal Academy, London, May 5, 1894.  Sir Frederic Leighton, President of the Royal Academy, was in the chair, and in proposing “The Health of Her Majesty’s Ministers,” to which Lord Rosebery replied, he said:  “No function could be more lofty, no problem is more complex than the governance of our Empire, so vast and various in land and folk as that which owns the sceptre of the Queen.  No toast, therefore, claims a more respectful reception than that to which I now invite your cordial response—­the health of the eminent statesmen in whose hands that problem lies—­Her Majesty’s Ministers.  And not admiration only for high and various endowments, but memories also of a most sparkling speech delivered twelve months ago at this table, sharpens the gratification with which I call for response on the brilliant statesman who heads Her Majesty’s Government, the Earl of Rosebery.”]

YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESS, MY LORDS, AND GENTLEMEN:  No one, I think, can respond unmoved for the first time in such an assembly as this in the character in which I now stand before you.  You have alluded, sir, to the speech which I delivered here last year.  But I have to confess with a feeling of melancholy that since that period I have made a change for the worse. [Laughter.] I have had to exchange all those dreams of imagination to which I then alluded, which are, I believe, the proper concomitants of the Foreign Office intelligently wielded, and which, I have no doubt, my noble friend on my right sees in imagination as I did then—­I have had to exchange all those dreams for the dreary and immediate prose of life—­all the more dreary prose because a great deal of it is my own.