I very highly appreciate the chance to address the University of Berlin in the year that closes its first centenary of existence. It is difficult for you in the Old World fully to appreciate the feelings of a man who comes from a nation still in the making to a country with an immemorial historic past; and especially is this the case when that country, with its ancient past behind it, yet looks with proud confidence into the future, and in the present shows all the abounding vigor of lusty youth. Such is the case with Germany. More than a thousand years have passed since the Roman Empire of the West became in fact a German empire. Throughout mediæval times the Empire and the Papacy were the two central features in the history of the Occident. With the Ottos and the Henrys began the slow rise of that Western life which has shaped modern Europe, and therefore ultimately the whole modern world. Their task was to organize society and to keep it from crumbling to pieces. They were castle-builders, city-founders, road-makers; they battled to bring order out of the seething turbulence around them; and at the same time they first beat back heathendom and then slowly wrested from it its possessions.
After the downfall of Rome and the breaking in sunder of the Roman Empire, the first real crystallization of the forces that were working for a new uplift of civilization in western Europe was round the Karling house, and, above all, round the great Emperor, Karl the Great, the seat of whose empire was at Aachen. Under the Karlings the Arab and the Moor were driven back beyond the Pyrenees; the last of the old heathen Germans were forced into Christianity, and the Avars, wild horsemen from the Asian steppes, who had long held tented dominion in middle Europe, were utterly destroyed. With the break-up of the Karling empire came chaos once more, and a fresh inrush of savagery: Vikings from the frozen north, and new hordes of outlandish riders from Asia. It was the early emperors of Germany proper who quelled these barbarians; in their time Dane and Norseman and Magyar became Christians, and most of the Slav peoples as well, so that Europe began to take on a shape which we can recognize to-day. Since then the centuries have rolled by, with strange alternations of fortune, now well-nigh barren, and again great with German achievement in arms and in government, in science and the arts. The centre of power shifted hither and thither within German lands; the great house of Hohenzollern rose, the house which has at last seen Germany spring into a commanding position in the very forefront among the nations of mankind.
To this ancient land, with its glorious past and splendid present, to this land of many memories and of eager hopes, I come from a young nation, which is by blood akin to, and yet different from, each of the great nations of middle and western Europe; which has inherited or acquired much from each, but is changing and developing every inheritance and acquisition into something new and strange. The German strain in our blood is large, for almost from the beginning there has been a large German element among the successive waves of newcomers whose children's children have been and are being fused into the American nation; and I myself trace my origin to that branch of the Low Dutch stock which raised Holland out of the North Sea. Moreover, we have taken from you, not only much of the blood that runs through our veins, but much of the thought that shapes our minds. For generations American scholars have flocked to your universities, and, thanks to the wise foresight of his Imperial Majesty the present Emperor, the intimate and friendly connection between the two countries is now in every way closer than it has ever been before.
Germany is pre-eminently a country in which the world movement of to-day in all of its multitudinous aspects is plainly visible. The life of this university covers the period during which that movement has spread until it is felt throughout every continent, while its velocity has been constantly accelerating, so that the face of the world has changed, and is now changing, as never before. It is therefore fit and appropriate here to speak on this subject.