[Speech of Theodore Roosevelt at the nineteenth annual dinner of the New England Society in the City of Brooklyn, December 21, 1898.  The President, William B. Davenport, in calling upon Theodore Roosevelt to speak to the toast, “The Day we Celebrate,” said:  “For many years we have been celebrating this day and looking at ourselves through Yankee eyes.  To-night it is to be given us to see ourselves as others see us.  We have with us one of whom it may be said, to paraphrase the epitaph in the Welsh churchyard:—­

’A Dutchman born, at Harvard bred,
In Cuba travelled, but not yet dead.’

In response to this toast, I have the honor of introducing Hon.
Theodore Roosevelt.”]

MR. PRESIDENT, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:—­The gentleman on my right, with the unmistakably Puritan name of McKelway, in the issue of the “Eagle” to-night alluded to me as a Yankeeized Hollander.  I am a middling good Yankee.  I always felt that at these dinners of the New England Society, to which I come a trifle more readily than to any other like affairs, I and the president of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, who is also invariably in attendance, represent, what you would say, the victims tied to the wheels of the Roman chariot of triumph.  You see I am half Irish myself, and, as I told a New England Senator with whom I am intimate, when he remarked that the Dutch had been conquered by the New Englanders, “the Irish have avenged us.”

I want to say to you seriously, and, singularly enough, right along the lines of the admirable speech made by your President, a few words on the day we celebrate and what it means.

As the years go by, this nation will realize more and more that the year that has just passed has given to every American the right to hold his head higher as a citizen of the great Republic, which has taken a long stride forward toward its proper place among the nations of the world.  I have scant sympathy with this mock humanitarianism, a mock humanitarianism which is no more alien to the spirit of true religion than it is to the true spirit of civilization, which would prevent the great, free, liberty and order-loving races of the earth doing their duty in the world’s waste spaces because there must needs be some rough surgery at the outset.  I do not speak simply of my own country.  I hold that throughout the world every man who strives to be both efficient and moral—­and neither quality is worth anything without the other—­that every man should realize that it is for the interests of mankind to have the higher supplant the lower life.  Small indeed is my sympathy with those people who bemoan the fact, sometimes in prose, sometimes in even weaker verse, that the champions of civilization and of righteousness have overcome the champions of barbarism or of an outworn tyranny, whether the conflict be fought by the Russian heralds of civilization in Turkestan, by the English champion of the higher life in the Eastern world, or by the men who upheld the Stars and Stripes as they freed the people of the tropic islands of the sea from the mediaeval tyranny of Spain.