Page:The Dedication of Germanic Museum of Harvard University p07.jpg

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The Dedication of Germanic Museum of Harvard University.
7

offers of gifts and other assistance from Germanic countries outside of Germany.

The formal presentation of the Emperor's munificent gift will now take place. I have the honor to introduce to you the representative of His Majesty on this occasion, Baron von dem Bussche, of the German Embassy at Washington.

ADDRESS BY BARON VON DEM BUSSCHE-HADDENHAUSEN.

President Eliot and Members of the Faculty, Ladies and Gentlemen:—The absence of my chief, the German Ambassador, which you all will certainly regret as much as I do, has conferred upon me the great honor to stand here before you to-day and address you as the representative of His Majesty the German Emperor, and as a conveyor of a message from Germany to the United States of America.

It is certainly not an accident that this great country and my fatherland are standing side by side in the front rank in all the important questions of modern civilization and progress; that both are displaying vitality, and the great bulk of the American people are closely linked together by ties of common origin, as the great majority of the inhabitants of this country have Germanic and a very large part even German blood in their veins. This accounts for the well-known fact that Germans coming to the United States at once feel themselves quite at home, and find it so easy to join the ranks of American citizenship, where they form, I am very proud to say, one of the best elements.

But, then, there not only exists the closest kinship of race between the two countries, that gave to his majesty the Emperor the right to say to his guests of the American navy at Kiel that “blood is thicker than water;” there is also another relationship which is intellectual and perhaps even more important and deeply rooted than the one first mentioned. German men of science have had, as you all know, no inconsiderable part in influencing the intellectual development of the United States. Not only have numbers of Americans lived and studied in Germany for many years, but there have been and there are still many Germans teaching in the intellectual centres of the New World, of