ADDRESS AT DINNER GIVEN TO MR. CHOATE BY THE BENCH

AND BAR OF ENGLAND

AT LINCOLN'S INN, APRIL 14th, 1905

ADDRESS AT DINNER GIVEN TO MR. CHOATE BY THE BENCH AND BAR OF ENGLAND

MY

AT LINCOLN'S INN, APRIL 14th, 1905

Y Lord Chancellor, my Lords, and Gentlemen, I may say brothers all, for I accept your presence here to-night as a signal proof that neither time, nor distance, nor oceans, nor continents can weaken the ties of sympathy and fraternity between the members of our noble profession wherever the English law has reached or the English tongue is spoken. On this spot, consecrated for centuries- I was going to say for unnumbered centuries to the study and development of the law, I feel that we are gathered to-night for a veritable professional love-feast, if I can judge from the kindly words of the Lord Chancellor and the Attorney-General and from your genial countenances. No profane presence of laymen, no troublesome affairs of clients, can disturb us here to-night. We are all lawyers, except the Judges, and they, too, are lawyers who have soared in ascension robes to a higher and

nobler sphere. I thank you all from the bottom of my heart. For an American lawyer who long since withdrew from the arena to find himself the guest of the united Bench and Bar of England, supported by the presence of all that is illustrious and famous among them, is a position which only overcomes me with a sense of my own unworthiness of the compliment you have paid me. I cannot but feel that in my person and over my head you desire to pay an unexampled honor to the great country that I represent, to its Bench and Bar, that daily share your labors and keep step with your progress, and to the great office that I am about to lay down.

Let me say a single word about the altogether too lavish compliments that the Lord Chancellor has paid me in respect to my official career in England. My task has not been the difficult work of diplomacy to which he has referred. It has all, from the day of my arrival here until now, been made absolutely easy by the spirit with which I have been received. The two representatives of this great country with whom I have had to do at the Foreign Office - Lord Salisbury and Lord Lansdowne have made my task perfectly easy, not only because they have always practised the modern diplomacy, meaning what they say and saying what they mean, with never a card up any sleeve on either side, but because in every single incident they have met me more than half-way in all that went towards conciliation, harmony, and union between the two countries. It was also

easy for us on both sides for other reasons -because the two great chiefs of State on either side, the late illustrious Queen and the present occupant of the Throne, his not less illustrious Majesty, upon the one side, and President McKinley and President Roosevelt upon the other, have all the while been determined that the two countries should be friends; and, back of all that, a circumstance which gave great force to everything that either has ever said, the rank and file, the great mass of the people on either side, were determined that nothing should happen to impair the friendship of the two peoples. I cannot tell you how much I thank you for your presence here to-night. I am especially proud that the chair is occupied by the Lord Chancellor, whose name in both countries is a synonym for equity and justice. In spite of his thirty-five years at the Bar and his eighteen years upon the Woolsack, he is the very incarnation of perennial youth. Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away, but the Lord Chancellor seems to stem the tide of time. Instead of retreating like the rest of us before its advancing waves, he is actually working his way up stream. He demonstrates what I have been trying to prove for the last three years, that the eighth decade of life is far the best, and I am sure he will join with me in advising you all to hurry up and get into it as soon as you can. He gave me his personal friendship immediately after my arrival here, which has all the time been growing stronger and stronger; and, while he has