I know that at first one could not find a place; that there was available only a building in course of construction, intended to be the Pasteur School at Neuilly.  This building was far from completion; it lacked doors and there were no stairs.  I know that in three weeks your generosity, your energy, and your quick intelligence has made of this uncertain shell a modern military hospital, with white walls, electric light, baths, rooms for administering anaesthetics, operating rooms, sterilizing plants, apparatus for X-rays, and a dental clinic.  I know that automobiles, admirably adapted to the service, carried the wounded.  And yet I do not know all.  I know only by instinct of the devotion of your young girls, of your women, and of your young men, belonging often to prominent families, who served as stretcher bearers and orderlies.

I am not ignorant of the fact that they count by the hundreds those who have been cured at the American Ambulance at Neuilly, nor of the further fact that the rate of mortality is extremely low, although they have sent you those most gravely injured.  I know that it is all free; that there are no charges made for the expenses of administration; that for the service rendered by your people there is no claim, and that every cent of every dollar subscribed goes entirely and directly to the care of the wounded.  I know also that the expenses at the hospital are $4,000 a day, and that ever since the beginning your charity has met this demand.

Such splendid effort has not been ignored or misunderstood.  The President of the French Republic has cabled to President Wilson his appreciation and his gratitude; General Fevier, Inspector General of Hospitals of the French Army, has publicly expressed his admiration; the English physicians and public men have shared their sentiments.

As to the people of Paris, as to the French nation, they have been touched to the depths of their being.  And yet in France we have found all this quite natural.  I shall tell you why.  We have so high a regard for you that when you do anything well no one is surprised.  I believe that if a wounded soldier arriving at your hospital exclaimed, “This is wonderful!” his comrade who had been ahead of him would answer in a tone of admonition:  “That surprises you?  You do not know then that it is done by the Americans, by the people from the United States?” In this refusal to be astonished in the face of remarkable achievements, when they come from you, there is a tribute, a praise of high quality which your feelings and your patriotism will know how to appreciate.

I have said that all that comes from you which is good and great seems natural to us, and I have given you a reason; but there is another.  In France we are accustomed to consider the Republic of the United States as an affectionate, distant sister.  When one receives a gift from a stranger one is astonished and cries out his thanks, but when the gift comes from a brother or from some one who, on similar occasions, has never failed, the thanks are not so outspoken but more profound.  One says:  “Ah, it is you, my brother.  I suffer.  I expected you.  I knew that you would come, for I should have gone to you had you needed me.  I thank you.”