A fortnight after the Sorbonne address, I received from a friend, an American military officer living in Paris who knows well its general habit of mind, a letter from which I venture to quote here, because it so strikingly portrays the influence that Mr. Roosevelt exerted as an orator during his European journey: 

I find that Paris is still everywhere talking of Mr. Roosevelt.  It was a thing almost without precedent that this blase city kept up its interest in him without abatement for eight days; but that a week after his departure should still find him the main topic of conversation is a fact which has undoubtedly entered into Paris history.  The Temps [one of the foremost daily newspapers of Paris] has had fifty-seven thousand copies of his Sorbonne address printed and distributed free to every schoolteacher in France and to many other persons.  The Socialist or revolutionary groups and press had made preparations for a monster demonstration on May first.  Walls were placarded with incendiary appeals and their press was full of calls to arms.  Monsieur Briand [the Prime Minister] flatly refused to allow the demonstration, and gave orders accordingly to Monsieur Lepine [the Chief of Police].  For the first time since present influences have governed France, certainly in fifteen years, the police and the troops were authorized to use their arms in self-defence.  The result of this firmness was that the leaders countermanded the demonstration, and there can be no doubt that many lives were saved and a new point gained in the possibility of governing Paris as a free city, yet one where order must be preserved, votes or no votes.  Now this stiff attitude of M. Briand and the Conseil is freely attributed in intelligent quarters to Mr. Roosevelt.  French people say it is a repercussion of his visit, of his Sorbonne lecture, and that going away he left in the minds of these people some of that intangible spirit of his—­in other words, they felt what he would have felt in a similar emergency, and for the first time in their lives showed a disregard of voters when they were bent upon mischief.  It is rather an extraordinary verdict, but it has seized the Parisian imagination, and I, for one, believe it is correct.

Some of the English newspapers, while generally approving of the Sorbonne address, expressed the feeling that it contained some platitudes.  Of course it did; for the laws of social and moral health, like the laws of hygiene, are platitudes.  It was interesting to have a French engineer and mathematician of distinguished achievements, who discussed with me the character and effect of the Sorbonne address, rather hotly denounce those who affected to regard Mr. Roosevelt’s restatement of obvious, but too often forgotten truth, as platitudinous.  “The finest and most beautiful things in life,” said this scientist, “the most abstruse scientific discoveries, are based upon platitudes.  It is a platitude to say