36   THE SITUATION IN THE FAR EAST
Kaneko was also a graduate of Harvard. " Blood is thicker than water," — especially academic blood, ruddy with the red globules of football, the classics, Chief Justice Story, and ever revered Professor Langdale of the Cambridge law school. Besides, all knew that even before he was a Baron Harvard had decorated Kentaro Kaneko for his distinguished services to his country with its own highest university honors. So, of course, all this did not in the least prejudice the minds of those present against anything he might have to say, or tend to muffle their hands in the resonance of their tumultuous claps.
How a speaker lives up to the subject and the occasion he takes in hand is the supreme test of an orator, or better yet, of the stamp of man he is in himself. Does he magnify or belittle his subject; does he lift it or degrade it ? In reality, — call it anything one will, — an address to a club of Harvard Japanese students or what not, — this was in essence the pathetic plea for justice and mercy on the part of one bleeding nation menaced with brutal annihilation to another fair-play-loving nation, strong in the possession of its own inalienable rights. It is a theme one rarely hears treated in such a presence, involving as it does depth of passion seldom stirring the heart of a speaker. The simple occasion, then, was silently eloquent enough in itself to pre-enlist the sympathies of the assemblage.