XVI SPEECH OF MR. HENRY W. TAFT 1 MR. PRESIDENT, MR. AMBASSADOR, MR. MINISTER, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: When your president asked me to say a few words to-night, I had no idea that I was to have the pleasure of attending a function of such splendor as this, nor did I at all appreciate the strength and dignity and importance of this organization. I told the president that I would take pleasure in saying a word of greeting as I had arrived fresh from your native land. I wish I could address you in French, but the only French that I know I learned in French Canada, and while the Canadians say that theirs is the French of Molière and that it is the Parisian French that has become corrupted in these hundreds of years, yet I am afraid that if I attempted to speak the Canadian French I might incur the hostility of these formidable military guards that I have seen standing here, whose duty it is, no doubt, to protect among other things, the purity of the French language. As the Ambassador has said, I have come direct from the Chicago convention and so I might have said something about politics; but the president of your association was good enough to send me a copy of your year book, and I there observed, at a page which he had considerately turned down, a by-law which was worded: "All political discussions are excluded." Furthermore, perhaps you are not interested in politics. We become sometimes preoccupied with our own environment and mistakenly think everybody is in1 Delivered before the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris, July 4, 1912. terested in those things that we ourselves are engrossed with. In that connection I might mention the experience that my wife had on the steamer coming across the ocean, when she sat beside a lady with whom she entered into casual conversation. She was an American lady who was on her way to her twentieth cure at Carlsbad, and my wife said to her among other things that we had been to the Chicago convention. The lady quite opened her eyes and asked: "That was a convention of doctors, was it not?" I had the pleasure of meeting in New York the delegates who were sent to the Champlain Tricentenary, and amongst others my very distinguished friend upon my left. I attended the function in their honor, and I think our hospitalities were pretty persistent and they displayed unusual endurance. As I stand here I am reminded of a speech-I think it was Baron d'Estournelles de Constant who made the speech, or perhaps it was one of the other distinguished gentlemen. He quite seriously discussed the question of the high cost of living, which subject has very much interested our country, as well, I think, as all other countries of the world. He said: "If you would send your American women to learn the economy of the French women you would take a step in advance." My experience with the French women has not yet convinced me of the truth of his remark, but I must say to you that so far as I myself am concerned, my experience has been with the French women who keep the shops in the Rue de la Paix, and I have not found them especially good teachers of economy. Mr. President, I am a member of the committee which has been appointed to secure for the United States the celebration of a saner Fourth of July. We seek less noise and more sentiment, more expression of patriotism which will recall to our memory those great men who have given us the priceless boon of liberty regulated by law. Such an occasion as this I count as most useful in that direction, and I hope that we in America may emulate the example of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris in celebrating this great anniversary by recalling to mind, as the eminent gentlemen here present have already so eloquently done, the principles that those wise men of one hundred and thirty years ago embodied in that great instrument of free government, the Constitution of the United States, and the sentiments which they expressed in that eloquent dissertation upon the rights of man, the Declaration of Independence. This Chamber of Commerce can perform a most useful function in continuing the present friendly relations between France and America. I cannot, at this late hour, go over the various possible fields of its usefulness; but, to mention one, in the important question of the tariff, your body can do much to eliminate the misunderstandings that constantly arise in relation to the trade between the two countries. We are surely approaching an era in our country where the schedules of our tariff will be based upon the strictest investigation of the facts, and that is a most difficult thing under present conditions. We have, however, established a Tariff Commission, whose duty it is to investigate cost of production and cost of manufacture. A body like yours can be most useful in aiding such a commission in ascertaining facts, and if the facts be ascertained beyond dispute, our Congress cannot resist the force of public opinion in considering them in framing the schedules of the tariff law. If that be done, and if the principle of our protection be preserved upon such a basis, nobody can complain. Then another aid to |