"We will settle the controversy about the way it should be done by trying one thing first, and if that does not work, we will try the other."
Another difficulty about this measure is that there is a difference in appreciation of its importance in different parts of the country. Down here on the seaboard I think most people do appreciate it. You appreciate it; all the people who are concerned, or wish to be concerned, in South American trade, or the trade of the Orient, appreciate it; but you go back into the interior of the country, into the great agricultural states of the Northwest, and the farther Middle West, states along in the valley of the Mississippi and the Missouri, and the people there are thinking about other things, and they have a natural dislike for subsidies, and when told that a measure means giving somebody else something for nothing, they express and impress upon their representatives a great dislike for it. The way for us to get something done is not for us who are in favor of it to talk to each other about it. We can do that indefinitely without getting much farther. The way is to take steps to bring to the minds of the people of the valley of the Missouri and the Northwest, and those great agricultural states the importance to them, as well as to us, of having our merchant marine restored.
I noticed the other day that the people of San Francisco were justifying their confidence in themselves by procuring all their business correspondents in the state of New York to write letters to me in favor of having the great "Exposition and Celebration of the Opening of the Canal in San Francisco"; and these letters came in by the thousand from my constituents. They became so tiresome that I came very near voting against the project as a measure of revenge; but it showed the San Francisco people understood where to go in order to preach their doctrine. They did not talk to each other on the Pacific coast about it. They came to New York and got their business correspondents interested in it, and got them to talk to their representatives about it. That is what you want to do in Kansas and Nebraska and Iowa and the Dakotas—you want, through all the relations that you have, and by every means in your power, to represent to the people of those great interior states, who have but little direct relation with the ocean commerce of the world, the real conditions under which we exist, and the importance to the whole country of doing something; and if they do come to appreciate the importance to the country of doing what you are talking about, then they will be for it, for they are sincere, patriotic Americans.
There is but one thing more I want to say regarding the relations which underlie the success of such an enterprise as you are now engaged in. Of course, you have had a great amount of advice, and a great many speakers have told you a great many things you know, and I am going to put myself in line with the distinguished gentlemen who have preceded me by doing the same thing. At the basis of all intercourse, commercial as well as social, necessarily lies a genuine good understanding. That cannot be simulated; the pretense of it is in general, in the long run, futile. People trade with those with whom they have sympathy; they tend to trade with their friends. The basis of all permanent commercial intercourse is benefit to both parties—not that cut-throat relation which may exist between enemies, where one is trying to do the other—and a relation founded upon mutual respect, good understanding, sympathy, and friendship; and the way to reach the condition which is thus essential is by personal intercourse and acquaintance between the men of Anglo-Saxon or German or Norse, or whatever race they may be, peopling the United States, and the men of the Latin American race peopling the countries of the South.
This is something, my friends, in which our people are very deficient. So long have we been separated from the other nations of the earth that one of our faults is a failure to appreciate the qualities of the people who are unlike us. I have often had occasion to quote something that Bret Harte said about the people of a frontier western camp, to whom came a stranger who was regarded by them as having "the defective moral quality of being a foreigner." Difference from us does not involve inferiority to us. It may involve our inferiority to somebody else. The sooner our business men open their minds to the idea that the peoples of other countries, different races and speaking different languages and with different customs and laws, are quite our equals, worthy of our respect, worthy of our esteem, regard, and affection, the sooner we shall reach a basis on which we can advance our commerce all over the world. A little more modesty is a good thing for us occasionally; a little appreciation of the good qualities of others—and let me tell you that nowhere on earth are there more noble, admirable and lovable qualities to be found among men than you will find among the people of Latin America.
Gentlemen, I hope for you the effectiveness of a great and permanent organization, and that you may advance the time when through more perfect knowledge, through broader sympathies and a better understanding, ties of commerce may bind together all our countries, advance our wealth and prosperity and well-being with equal step as they advance the wealth and prosperity and well-being of all those with whom we deal, and increase the tie of that perfect understanding of other peoples which is the condition of unbroken and permanent peace.