but your misfortune, of course.
You did not hear it because you were not here. You were asleep in your
own beds, of course, where Dutchmen always go when they are sleepy,
which is perhaps the principal reason why they are not caught napping in
business hours. Unfortunately, however, that speech was printed in full,
or I might repeat it now. One learns from such little experiences what
not to do the next time. But if you do not remember the speech, I do--at
least the subject--which was "The Dutch as Neighbors," and it has seemed
wise to get as far as possible from that subject to-night lest I might
be tempted to plagiarize, and so I propose to talk for a moment only
about "The Dutch as Enemies."

I do not like the first suggestion of this subject any more than do you.
For to think of a man as an enemy is to think ill of him, and to
intimate that the Dutchman was not and is not perfect is to intimate
something which no one here will believe, and which no one certainly
came to hear. But as a matter of fact, gentlemen, no one can be perfect
without being an enemy any more than he can be perfect without being a
friend. The two things are complementary; the one is the reverse side of
the other. Everything in this universe, except a shadow, has two
sides--unless, perhaps, it may be a political machine whose
one-sidedness is so proverbial as to suggest that it also is a thing
wholly of darkness caused by someone standing in the way of the light.
The Dutchman, however, is not a shadow of anything or of anybody. You
can walk around him, and when you do that you find that he has not only
a kindly face and a warm hand, but something called backbone, and it is
that of which I am to speak to-night, for it suggests about all that I
mean by the Dutchman as an enemy.

Some people are enemies, or become enemies, because of their spleen;
others because of their total depravity; and others still because they
persist in standing upright when someone wants them to lie down and be
stepped on. That is the meaning of backbone, in this world of human
strife, and if, from time to time, it has made an enemy of the
peace-loving Dutchman, it has been the kind of enmity that has gathered
to itself not a little gratitude, for after all it is the kind of enmity
that has made this world more tolerable as a place of temporary abode. If
no one opposes tyrants and thieves and heretics and franchise-grabbers,
city lots fall rapidly in price. It is the Dutc