Trinity College School - Record Yearbook (Port Hope, Ontario Canada)

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TRINITY COLLEGE SCHOOL RECORD 13 A SPEECH T0 BE REMEMBERED General Eisenhower's address given at the Guildhall, London, on the occasion of his receiving the Freedom of the City. fReprinted from the Illustrated London News, June 23, 1945! The high sense of distinction I feel in receiving this great honour from the City of London is inescapably mingled with feelings of profound sadness. All of us must always regret that your country and mine were ever faced with the tragic situation that compelled the appointment of an Allied Commander-in-chief, my capacity in which has just been so extravagantly commended. Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in the blood of his followers and the sacrifices of his friends. Conceivably a commander may have been professionally superior. He may have given everything of his heart and mind to meet the spiritual and physical needs of his comrades. He may have written a chapter that will glow forever in the pages of military his- tory. Still, even such a man, if he existed, would sadly face the facts that his honours cannot hide in his memories the crosses marking the resting-places of the dead. They cannot soothe the anguish of the widow or the orphan Whose husband or father will not return. The only attitude in which a commander may with satisfaction receive the tributes of his friends, is in humble acknowledgment that, no matter how unworthy he may be, his position is a symbol of great human forces that have laboured arduously and successfully for a righteous cause. Unless he feels this symbolism and this rightness in what he has tried to do, then he is disregardful of the courage, the fortitude, and devotion of the vast multitudes he has been honoured to command. If all the Allied men and women that have served with me in this war can only know that it is they this august body is really honouring to-day, then, indeed, will I be content.

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12 TRINITY COLLEGE SCHOOL RECORD For false Christs and false prophets shall rise, and shall shows signs and wonders, to seduce, if it were possible, even the elect. The Chaplain began by saying that, above all, God wants everyone to be happy, but to live and be happy, one must have discipline, initiative, courage, and unseliishness. He went on to say that when Christ and His principles are rejected, false gods are erected. By Way of illustra- tion, he spoke of the false gods erected by the Axis nations, those of Race and State, the false god of an economic theory, and a false god truly to be dreaded, that of one- self. Christianity and Christian principles must be brought back again if We are to have a happier World. 1

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14 TRINITY COLLEGE SCHOOL RECORD This feeling of humility cannot erase, of course, my great pride in being tendered the Freedom of London. I am not a native of this land. I come from the very heart of America. In the superficial aspects by which we or- dinarily recognise family relationships, the town where I was born and the one where I was reared are far separated from this great city. Abilene, Kansas, and Denison, Texas, would together add in size to possibly one-five-hundredth part of Greater London. By your standards those towns are young, without your aged traditions that carry the roots of London back into the uncertainties of unrecorded history. To those people I am proud to belong, but I 'rind myself to-day five thousand miles from that countryside, the honoured guest of a city whose name stands for grandeur and size throughout the world. Hardly would it seem possible for the London Council to have gone farther afield to find a man to honour with its priceless gift of token citizenship. Yet kinship among nations is not determined in such measurements as proximity, size, and age. Rather we should turn to those inner things, call them what you will -I mean those intangibles that are the real treasures free men possess. To preserve his freedom of worship, his equality before the law, his liberty to speak and act as he sees fit, subject only to the provision that he trespass not upon similar rights of others-the Londoner will fight! So will the citizen of Abilene! When we consider these things, then the valley of the Thames draws closer to the farms of Kansas and the plains of Texas. To my mind it is clear, that when two peoples will face the tragedies of war to defend the same spiritual values, the same treasured rights, then, in deepest sense, those two are truly related. So, even as I proclaim my undying Americanism, I am bold enough and exceedingly proud to claim basic kinship to you of London. And what man who has followed the history of this war could fail to experience inspiration from the example