Addis Abeba, 10th of October 1965
“Your Imperial Majesty, Your Excellencies, and Distinguished Guests: it has been a source of great pleasure for me and the members of my party, to have been able to accept the kind invitation of His Imperial Majesty and be with you just now.
In our country and in many parts of the world, His Imperial Majesty is admired affectionately and treated as a great and good man. He has suffered for the people of Ethiopia. He led the people in the battlefield, and when calamity overtook them, he appealed to the conscience of the world. He pleaded with the League of Nations, suffered exile and came back to power, and since then he has been trying to modernise Ethiopia, to bring to it all the great benefits which modern industry, economic progress and modem reforms can offer to a people.
We have been greatly struck by the fact that though he is a devout Christian, he allows freedom of thought, expression and belief to the Muslims, to the Jews and others who inhabit this land. The calamities which intolerance brings, racial and religious, are to be seen in different parts of the world and are overcome only by the growth of tolerance and understanding, the spirit which His Imperial Majesty is showing in the administration of his country.”