Latin America and the United States / Addresses by Elihu Root

by Elihu Root

The annals of the United States could be traced by the route of this numerous constellation, whose radiant points sparkle around yon apex, to send forth their beams today from yon gallery, illumining the Brazilian Senate, transfiguring the scene of our ordinary deliberations, and realizing, with the pomp of the evocation of this glorious past, the spectacle of the visit of one nation to the other which the illustrious Secretary of State presented before our eyes when, a few days ago, he said in response to our eminent and worthy Minister for Foreign Relations, that his coming in the official capacity of his office to the land of the Cruzeiro constitutes a natural expression of the friendship which the eighty millions of inhabitants of the great Republic of the North feel toward the twenty million souls of the Republic of Brazil.

It is not, then, a diplomatic representation; it is not an embassy. It is the Government of the United States itself in person, in one of its predominant organs—an organ so exalted that it holds almost as high a position there in the national sentiment as the Presidency itself. For the first time is the North American Union visiting another part of the continent—Latin America. And this direct, personal and most solemn visit of one America to the other has now as its scene the Brazilian Senate, assuming, within the brief dimensions of this chamber, the magnificent proportions of a picture for which our nation constitutes the frame and the attentive circle of the nations the gallery.

For the modest importance of our nation, the event is of incomparable significance. None other can be likened to it in the history of our existence as a republic. After sixteen years of embarrassments, perils, and conflicts, the latter appears to be receiving its final consecration in this solemnity. It is the grand recognition of our democracy, the proclamation of the attainment of our majority as a republic. The stability of the government, its prestige, its honor and its vigor, could not have received a greater attestation before the world. Replying to the doubts, the negations, and the affronts with which our '89 was received, amidst passions at home and prejudices abroad, it signifies the irrevocable triumph of our revolution, closes forever the era of monarchical reassertions and opens up our future to order, confidence, and labor.

Almost all of us who compose this assembly, Mr. President, belong to that generation who were opening their eyes to public life, or were preparing for it by their higher studies, when the struggle was going on in the United States between slavery and freedom—that campaign of Titans which tore the entrails of America and shook the globe for many years.

Washington, Jefferson, and Madison had died, despairing of the extinction of slavery. This being openly proclaimed as the corner stone of the Confederacy, which gloried in having as its basis and in holding as a supreme truth the subjection by Providence of one race to the other, it looked as if the work of the patriarchs of 1787 was doomed to inevitable destruction against the black rock, thus consummating the Jeffersonian prophecy.

But Christian order prevailed against the chaos of servile interests, showing that the Constitution of the United States was not that "league with death" and that "compact with hell," as was boldly declared by Garrison upon the breaking out of the abolitionist reaction. And when the Union rose again, still clinging to liberty, on the ruins of slavery and dismemberment, we who had heard the earthquake, we who had witnessed the opening of the abyss, we who had seen swallowed up in it a million lives and an incalculable amount of wealth, and knew of the misfortunes and tears it had caused, were surprised by the divine dawn which finally appeared with the consoling victory of justice; and we felt the penetration of its rays here into the depths of the Brazilian conscience, realizing, with a holy horror of the tragedy of which we had just been the witnesses, that we were still a country of slaves.

Very soon, however, the law of September 28, 1874, immediately thereafter Brazilian abolitionism, and shortly thereafter the brilliant stroke of abolition in 1888, responded to the splendid American lesson by our purification from this stigma.

And if we adopted this lesson in 1889 and 1891, when we embraced the federal system and framed a republican constitution, it was not, as has been said, in obedience to the wishes, caprices, or predilections of theorists. Ever since the beginning of the past century, the liberal spirit among us had become imbued with Americanism through reading The Federalist. The idea of federation carried away the Brazilian Liberals in 1831. The condemnation of the monarchy in Brazil involved fundamentally that of administrative centralization and the single-headed form of government which were embodied in that régime. The United States gave us the first model, and up to that time had furnished us the only example of a republican form of government, extending over a territorial expanse such as only monarchies had previously shown themselves capable of governing. The dilemma was inevitable. We had either to adhere to the European solution, which is a constitutional monarchy, or else establish a republic on the American model.

We are still today as far from the perfect model which the United States present of a federal republic, as we were from a likeness to England under the parliamentary monarchy, although England was the example we followed in that régime, just as the United States is our example in our present government. But just as our backwardness in parliamentary customs was no cause for us to revert from a constitutional to an absolute monarchy, so the insufficiency of our republican customs constitutes no reason for abandoning the federal republic. There are no conditions more favorable for the political education of a nation than those presented by our constitutional mechanism, modeled after the American type; nor could a practical schooling be offered us for such education equal to that of an intimate approximation between us and our great model, our relations of all kinds with the United States being drawn closer and multiplied.

Between them and us there was interposed the stupid, sullen wall of prejudices and suspicions with which weakness naturally imagines to shelter and protect itself from force. But this wall is cracking, tottering, and beginning to crumble to ruins under the action of the soil and the atmosphere—under the influx of the sentiments awakened by this great movement of friendship on the part of the United States toward the other American nations.