Chapter 7

I thank you for the kind reference to myself, and I thank you for the high terms in which you have spoken of my country, from which I am so far away. Do not think, I beg you, sir, if I accept what you have said regarding the country I love, that we, in the north, consider ourselves so perfect as your description of us. We have virtues, we have good qualities, and we are proud of them; but we ourselves know in our own hearts how many faults we have. We know the mistakes we have made, the failures we have made, the tasks that are still before us to perform. Yet from the experiences of our efforts and our successes, and from the experiences of our faults and our failures, we, the oldest of the organized republics of America, say to you of Uruguay, and to all our sisters, "Be of good cheer and confident hope."

You have said, Mr. President, in your eloquent remarks this evening, that the progress of Uruguay has been slow. Slow as measured by our lives, perhaps, but not slow as measured by the lives of nations. The march of civilization is slow; it moves little during single human lives. Through the centuries and the ages it proceeds with deliberate and certain step. Look to England, whence came the principles embodied in your constitution, and ours, where first were developed the principles of free representative government. Remember through how many generations England fought and bled in her wars of the White and the Red--her blancos and colorados--the white rose of York and the red rose of Lancaster, before she could win her way to the security of English law.

Look to France, whence came the great declarations of the rights of man and remember--I in my own time can remember--the Tuileries standing in bright and peaceful beauty, and then in a pile of blackened ruins bearing the inscription, "Liberty, equality, and fraternity," doing injustice to liberty, to equality, and to fraternity. These nations have passed through their furnaces. Every nation has had its own hard experience in its progressive development, but a nation is certain to progress if its tendency is right. It is so with Uruguay. You are passing through the phases of steady development. The restless and untiring soul of José Artigas, who made the independence of Uruguay possible, did its work in its time, but its time is past; it is not the day of Artigas now.

The genius of the two great men, for the love of whom your political parties crystallized upon one side and upon the other, had its day, but that day has passed away. Step by step Uruguay is taking its course, as the elder nations of the earth have been taking theirs, steadily onward and upward, seeking more perfect justice and ordered liberty.

One of the most deeply seated feelings in the human heart is love of approbation. May we not have such relations to each other that the desire for each other's approbation shall sustain us in the right course and warn us away from the wrong, and help us in our development to preserve high ideals, the ideals of justice and humanity necessary to free self-government? It is with that hope that I am here, your guest. It is with that desire that my people send the message of friendship to yours.

In the name of my President, Theodore Roosevelt, I offer you, Mr. President, the most sincere assurance of friendship and confidence.

SPEECH OF DOCTOR ZORRILLA DE SAN MARTÍN

At a Breakfast by the Reception Committee, in the Atheneum at Montevideo August 12, 1906

Before we rise from the table I have the pleasant task of saying to you a few words to reflect and perpetuate the sentiment which has caused us to desire to share with you the bread of Uruguay and to drink in your company the wine which gladdens the heart of man, according to the expression of the Holy Book.

Yes, Mr. Secretary, we are glad and happy to have you among us, and we wish that this repast, at which, as you see, a representative group of the ladies of Montevidean society surrounds and bestows graceful attention upon your most worthy spouse and your daughter, may be a symbol of the intense affection which can be shown to a welcome guest, that of opening to you the door of our home, that of introducing you into the affections of our household.

Yes, we are glad, sir, not only because we have the honor of knowing you to be a gentleman and an illustrious personage who is a glory among the glories of our America, but because--I must be very frank with you now,--because we are convinced that this visit of yours will redound to the honor as well as the benefit of that which is dearest to us, of that which we love above all else on earth, our good mother-country, Uruguay, this good sovereign mother of ours who is the mistress of our life and whom we cannot help believing, under pain of ceasing to be her sons, to be the greatest, the most beautiful and the most amiable of mothers, just as you think of yours, sir; just as you feel regarding your excellent American land. We, sir, being perhaps carried away by an ingenuous filial illusion, are persuaded that to know our Uruguay is to love her; and for this reason we have desired that you should know her; for this reason we cherish the hope that, when you have returned to your country and recall the sum of reminiscences of your memorable voyage, pleasant and lucid recollections will burst forth of this people which has been the first to shake your hand upon your setting foot on the soil of a republic of sub-tropical America, and which offers you its bread and drinks with you the wine of friendship in a sincere transport of enduring sympathy.

We thought, Mr. Secretary, that we saw you respectfully kiss the brow of our mother when, in a moment which should be considered historical, you defined at the Pan American Congress of Rio de Janeiro the object and character of your visit to the Spanish-American republics, to these favorite daughters who are advancing slowly but surely up the steep mountain at whose summit the ideal of self-government, freedom, and order, and the reign of internal justice and peace awaits them; these are the foundation and real guaranty of the reign of international justice and peace, to which we aspire.

Yes, Mr. Secretary, you spoke the truth in your memorable speech at Rio de Janeiro, and your words seem like corner stones. Sovereign states are not merely coexisting on the face of the earth, but are members of one great palpitating organism, collective persons who, obeying the same natural law which groups together physical persons into civil and political society, also instinctively group themselves together in order to form the body, the life, and the thought of the international world. Just as social life, far from disparaging the essential attributes of the sacred human person, constitutes the ambient medium necessary to the life, the development, and the attainment of the inalienable destiny of man, so this great commonwealth of nations, whose permanent establishment in America is the earnest desire of the Congress at Rio de Janeiro, should have as its inviolable basis and essential purpose the life, the honor, the prosperity, and the glory of the sovereign states which constitute it.

You have proclaimed democracy, sir, as the most powerful bond which unites the republics of America. But democracy is nothing else than the equality of men before the law, and is consequently above all the triumphant vindication of the right of the weak in their relations with the strong. Therefore, sir, in pronouncing this name of our common mother, you did so only in order to proclaim, as the American ideal in the relations of states, the same noble principle which governs the relations of free men, and which is the essence of our being; you proclaimed, then, a species of international American democracy in the bosom of which all persons should be persons with full self-consciousness, with an individual destiny independent of the destiny of others, with the moral and material means to accomplish this destiny, with freedom, with dignity, and with all the attributes which characterize and ennoble the person and distinguish it from inferior beings.

To elevate the moral level of this great international democracy which you have proclaimed, and of which our America should be the prototype, there is but one means, namely, to elevate the level of all and every one of the units which compose it, and to stimulate in all and every one of them a consciousness of and pride in their own destiny, an undying love for the abstract idea of country, and a deep conviction that in the sphere of peoples, just as in that of the orbs, there is no star, no matter how powerful, which can perturb the gravitation of the other stars; for over the entire body of the worlds stands the immutable law which governs them, and over this law is the sovereign will of the Supreme Legislator of orbs and of souls.

This was the echo in my mind, Mr. Secretary, of what you said at Rio de Janeiro and are confirming among us. Your words were great and good because they were yours, without any doubt; but they were so, above all, because they were in accord with the ideal of justice in pursuit of which humanity is slowly marching--with that solemn diapason hung between heaven and earth which furnishes the pitch from time to time to men and peoples and worlds, in order that they may not depart from the universal harmony.

Your words have reverberated like a friendly voice in the depths of the soul of this people, which has acclaimed you without reserve because it has understood you, sir. And for this reason, because I have thought that I interpreted all the generous intensity of your attitude and of your speeches, I have not told you at this time, as would have appeared natural, how much we in Uruguay love and admire your wonderful American country, whose stars shine perhaps without precedent in the sky of human history, but rather how much we respect and with what a passion we love our good Uruguayan mother-country, whose sun is also a star; how glad we are to see it honored by your visit, and how we cherish the hope that you will bear away a remembrance of us as a sincerely friendly people--a people very conscious of its own destinies, of its rights, and of its duties; in a word, a people very much in accord with that grand harmony which exists among sovereign states which respect and love one another, and which you have proclaimed in the name of your country as the supreme ideal of our free America.

Ladies and gentlemen, let us fill our glasses with the most generous wine, with the wine which most gladdens and cheers the heart of man--with the wine of hope--and let us drink to the health of our illustrious guest and messenger who represents here the intelligence and the thought of the heart, and to the health of his wife and daughter, who are the amiable symbol thereof; to the greater brilliancy of the stars of his country, our glorious friend; to the realization, on the American continent and throughout the world, of his exalted ideas of peace, fraternity, and justice.

REPLY OF MR. ROOT

I am deeply sensible of the honor you confer upon me and upon my family by this bounteous, hospitable, and graceful festival. It is a special honor that the banquet to which we are invited should be presided over by a gentleman who has such high esteem in the public life of your own country; that the flattering, the too flattering words which have been addressed to my poor self--words of just and kindly esteem regarding my great and noble country, should be spoken by a poet who breathes in his verses the spirit of Uruguay wherever his own world-known literature is found.

It is a cause of happiness to receive this distinguished consideration here in this temple devoted to science, to literature, to the arts, to those pursuits which dignify, ennoble, and delight mankind, which give the charm and grace to life, which make possible the continuance of mankind in the paths of civilization. Here in this Atheneum, in this atmosphere of scientific and literary discussion and thought, already exists that world-wide republic which knows no divisions of territorial boundary, of races, or of creed. Upon the platform you have erected here, the men of North and the men of South America can stand in fraternal embrace.

I have been preaching for the past few weeks in many places and before many audiences the gospel of international fraternization. I know there are many incredulous; there are many who think practical considerations alone rule the efforts of men--profit in trade, the almighty dollar, the balance of bookkeeping, or the checks in the counting house. There are many who think that this is all there is to life, and that he is an idle dreamer and an insincere orator who talks of the constancy of international friendship, who talks of love of country rising above the love of material things, who talks of sentiment as controlling the affairs of men. That may be true so far as their own short and narrow lives are concerned; but it is not an idle dream that the world through the course of ages is growing up from material to spiritual, to moral, and to intellectual life. It is not an idle dream that moral influences are gradually, steadily in the course of centuries taking the place of brute force in the control of the affairs of men. Sentiment rules the world today--the feelings of the great masses of mankind; the attractions and repulsions that move the millions rule the world today; and as generation succeeds generation progress is ever from the material to the moral. We cannot see it in a day; we cannot see it in a single lifetime, as we cannot see the movements of the tide. We see the waves, but the tide moves on imperceptibly. The progress, the steady and irresistible progress of civilization is ever onwards.

Mr. Chairman, and you, Señor Zorrilla de San Martín, in your eloquent, your more than eloquent, your poetic words, do honor to the idea of peace and justice and friendship and the rule of moral qualities in the relations of nations. When you do honor to the representative of that idea you are doing your work in your day and generation to advance the great cause that proceeds through the ages to the better and higher life of mankind. We are nothing; our lives are but as moments; our personal work is inappreciable in this world; but slowly, imperceptibly, we, each individually, add a little to or detract a little from human rights, human liberty, human justice.

I do not know how sufficiently to thank you, to thank the people of Montevideo, for all that you and they have done for me and my family during our brief--our all too brief--visit here. I believe that your kindness, your generous hospitality, will find response in the breasts of my countrymen; I believe that it will be an example to the people of South America and of North America; I believe that it will be evidence to the whole world that the ideas of friendship--of international friendship and courtesy--rule here in Uruguay; that Uruguay is a part of the great brotherhood of man, not selfish, but heart open to the best and brightest influences of humanity, doing her part in her time to advance the cause of civilization. I know that when tomorrow morning we sail away from Montevideo we shall all carry with us the most delightful visions of a fair and bright land, of a white city and a beautiful bay; memories of hospitality and friendship, and memories of the most beautiful women. We can never repay you, for your hospitality has been of the kind that asks for no payment; it has been true hospitality. We can only thank you, and thank you we do now and thank you we shall continue to do as long as we live.

ARGENTINA

BUENOS AYRES

ADDRESS OF HONORABLE EMILIO MITRE

In Reference to the Visit of Mr. Root, in the Chamber of Deputies July 4, 1906

This speech, delivered before Mr. Root reached Buenos Ayres, had an intimate relation to his reception.

Within a few weeks, Mr. President, Buenos Ayres will receive the visit of an eminent personality of the United States, Mr. Elihu Root, who is discharging in that country the duties of Secretary of State.

The Executive of the nation, having official knowledge of the visit of Mr. Root, has already taken measures to entertain him and to make his sojourn in the Argentine Republic agreeable; but it has appeared to me, Mr. President, that the Chamber of Deputies should itself spontaneously take an initiative in this manifestation, in view of the personality of the man and the country he represents.

The United States are for us, as is well known, the cradle of our democratic institutions; we are bound to them by those ties of friendship and of interest that are known to all and which it would be superfluous to enumerate; but apart from this, there exists between that country and ours historic bonds that secure our profound sympathies.

It is beneficial from time to time to ascend the currents of history in order to gather the lessons of the past which may serve us as a guide in our constant march into the future. When we study in its annals the action of the Government of the United States in the epoch of Argentine independence, we encounter demonstrations of a solicitude, of an affection, of a solidarity, of a participation in the struggles of those heroic times, so marked that the Argentine spirit necessarily feels itself impressed with the sentiment of intense gratitude and the necessity of repaying in some way those manifestations now somewhat forgotten.

It is of importance, Mr. President, that our people should know well the other peoples with whom they exchange products, manufactures, and ideas, especially when, in respect to the latter, those that they receive surpass in quantity those they give. And if there is any country that the Argentine people need to know well, any people, in its history, in its methods, in its sentiments, and in its intentions, it is the United States of America, the elder sister, the forerunner, and the model.

In the epoch of our independence, Mr. President, the public life of the United States was constantly interested in the vicissitudes of the struggle that these peoples waged for their independence on both slopes of the Andes and in the regions of Venezuela. If you read the messages of the Presidents of the United States you find in them, year after year, words that prove the interest of that country in the destiny of these countries. At a date as early as 1811, a message of President Madison contained phrases full of sympathy for the great communities which were struggling for their liberty in this part of the world; and the attention of Congress was called to the necessity of being prepared to enter into relations of government to government with them, as soon as their independence should be sanctioned.

From the time in which Monroe, the author of the famous doctrine, assumed the presidency of the republic, in all the messages at the opening of Congress, there is a distinct reference to the struggle of these nations for their independence, and in particular to the conflict that developed in the Rio de la Plata and the victorious progress of the arms of Buenos Ayres on this and on the other side of the mountains and on the plateau of Bolivia.

In all these documents reference is made to independence as a probable fact, which must necessarily at that time have exerted an influence in favor of the cause of the patriots; and often the declaration was repeated that, the colonies being emancipated, the United States did not seek and would not accept from them any commercial advantage that was not also offered to all other nations.

These manifestations which emanated from the Government and reflected the movement of public opinion, found eloquent exponents in Congress also.

In the records of the American Congress of 1817, one year after the declaration of independence by the Congress of Tucuman, a famous debate is recorded, begun by Henry Clay, the celebrated orator, who pleaded the cause of Argentine independence in the most enthusiastic terms. In this debate a Representative from New York also took a prominent part; this Representative bore the same name as the envoy whom we are to receive from the United States of America, Mr. Root.

Spain had complained of the expeditions that were fitted out in ports of the United States to foment American revolution. The Government was tolerant with these infractions of neutrality; popular sympathy made the condemnation of such conspirators impossible. Spain, with whom the United States had relations of great importance, and with whom they were negotiating the cession of Florida, had protested to the Government against these expeditions of its rebellious subjects. The President, forced to do so, had sent to Congress a message requesting the enactment of a law of neutrality. Clay and Root opposed it; and the latter said that it was worth while to go to war with Spain if a demonstration in favor of the liberty and independence of those countries could be made. Later, during the administration of John Quincy Adams, these manifestations of the American Government in favor of Argentine independence are met with on every page of the records of Congress. In 1818, the first discussion took place in the American Congress--a concrete discussion on the necessity of recognizing Argentine independence. Henry Clay was, as always, the leader of this discussion, following up the movements which, with extraordinary zeal, he had made at reunions, in the press, and in Congress. He delivered a speech that it is impossible for one to read without feeling his spirit moved on observing the solicitude, the interest, with which at that early date this apostle of democracy expressed himself in regard to the struggle of these peoples to gain their independence.

All, without exception, pronounced themselves in favor of the independence of these peoples, which they recognized in principle. But a parliamentary question of privilege was raised, as to the prerogative of the Executive, it being alleged that the initiative, proposed by Clay, of naming a minister to these countries, encroached upon the functions of the Executive when the latter believed it wise to send simply agents. On this question opinion was divided, but not a single vote was cast that did not express the warmest sympathy with the cause of the patriots.

While such was the attitude of the American Congress, in the press and in popular meetings manifestations of adhesion to the cause of the South American independence appeared at every moment. But above all, the place where traces of this determined action of the Government of the United States in favor of Argentine independence are to be found is in the records of the State Department at Washington, in which reference is made to the activity of its representative in London, at that time the famous statesman, Richard Rush. Rush was the minister of the United States in London from the end of 1817, when he left the post of Secretary of State. He began negotiations immediately with Lord Castlereagh, Prime Minister of England, to induce the British Foreign Office to enter upon a policy of frank adhesion to the emancipation of these countries from the dominion of Spain. There we see, Mr. President, how united the action of the United States was in this movement, inspired by the most sincere democratic desires, by a true love of liberty.

The Prime Minister of England received Mr. Rush's proposals coldly. England had been appealed to by Spain to mediate between her and the Holy Alliance, in order to obtain the submission of the rebellious provinces; and England had indicated the advisability of acceding to this reintegration of Spanish dominion, on the basis of the return of these countries to a state of dependence, with the condition of a general amnesty.