Latin America and the United States / Addresses by Elihu Root

by Elihu Root

In this attitude, in the transparent clearness of its intentions, in the eloquence of its language, and in the manifest frankness of its promises, there stands forth a broad image of truthfulness, which may be likened to those breezes in the sky on bright and sunny days which clear the horizon, cause the azure of the firmament to pervade our souls, and communicate the energy of life to our lungs. May God sustain the strong spirit of magnanimity, which is as advantageous to themselves as to the weak; and may He illumine the minds of the weak with an understanding of a situation which, mutually comprehended and maintained with firmness and honesty, will be productive of incalculable benefits for both parties!

The United States would already, long ago, have exhausted the admiration of the universe by the constant marvels of their greatness, if they were not continually surpassing themselves.

I do not allude to their wonderful fecundity, which in a hundred years has raised their population from five to eighty millions of souls. I do not speak of the greatness of their expansion, which has almost quintupled their territorial area in one century; I do not refer to the greatness of their military prowess, which has never yet met a conqueror either by land or sea. Neither am I occupying myself with the greatness of their opulence, which is tending to transfer from London to New York the center of capital and the money market of the world. I am thinking only of their benefits to democracy, to right, and to civilization.

Their fundamental principles as colonies were based on religious freedom. Their first charters embodied the essence of liberty in the British constitution. Their Federal Constitution is considered by the best judges as the highest product of political genius extant among mankind. The five years of their civil war constituted a most tremendous sacrifice, made by the superhuman heroism of a nation in the higher interests of humanity, for the principle of human freedom. Their international influence is frequently exerted in the great causes of Christianity and civilization, first struggling as they did against piracy in the Mediterranean; then opening the doors of Japan to the commerce of the world in the Pacific, or fighting for the Armenians against Ottoman despotism, or intervening in behalf of the Jews against the tyranny of the Muscovite; here sympathizing with South America against Spain, with Greece against Turkey, and with Hungary against Austria; there promoting that memorable peace between the Russians and Japanese at Portsmouth, which terminated one of the most horrible hecatombs of peoples on record in the history of warfare. The methods and rules of their teaching, the inspiration of their inventors, the penetrating nature of their institutions, the reproductive influence of their example, the contagious activity of their doctrines, the active proselytism of their reforms, the irresistible fascination of their originality, the exuberant florescence of their Christianity, all exert a profound influence upon European culture and on the morals, the politics, and the destinies of the world, and guide, improve, and transform the American nations.

Nothing, however, could be conceived which would more magnificently crown this miraculous career and assure forever to that nation the title, par excellence, of the civilizer among nations, serving the interests of its own prosperity as well as ours by a sincere, effective, and tenacious adherence to the doctrine announced by Mr. Root, namely the doctrine of mutual respect and friendship, of progressive coöperation among the American States, large or small, weak or strong; abandoning foolish race prejudices and admitting the superior power of imitation, science, and modern inventions, which are the moral factors in the development of peoples; and recognizing the natural truth that the growing evolution of the human race must embrace in its orbit of light all the civilized nations on this and the other continents.

Everything in the visit of Mr. Root, everything in his words, in his acts, in the impressions left among us by his person, everything speaks to us with absolute sincerity and resolute mind of devotion to this auspicious program. Our eminent guest has seen how Brazil receives the living message of the people of the United States; and, when he returns, a faithful witness of our civilization, which is so little known, so ill-treated, and so calumniated abroad, he will in all probability carry with him a conviction of having found in this disliked South America, between the Oyapoc and the Plata, the Atlantic and the Andes, a non-indigenous, although new sister of the United States, in which the opinion of public men and popular sentiment have but one ambition in regard to the policy now inaugurated—that it may become rooted for centuries and that it may shelter our future under its branches.

I wished, gentlemen—and all the members of this Senate wished—that Mr. Root might hear from the mouth of the man of experience, authority, and austere demeanor who is to preside over us, the most eloquent and highest of these expressions of good wishes.

For this purpose I move that the Senate do now resolve itself into a committee of the whole, and that the Secretary of State of the United States be invited to take the post of honor in this assembly. In this manner the proceedings of the Brazilian Senate and its traditions will preserve the memory of this date forever. For it is not one of those dates which flash and vanish into the past like falling meteors, but it is of those which seek the future by luminously furrowing the horizon of posterity like ascending stars.

And if the future is to be a substitution of right in place of might, of arbitration in place of war, of congresses in place of armies, of harmony, coöperation, and solidarity among the American peoples, in place of hostile rivalries, we may, on seeing seated here today at the right of our President, the Secretary of State of the United States, affirm to him, as Henry Clay did on the reception of Lafayette, with a different intention but just as truthfully, that he is seated in the midst of posterity.

Speech of Senator Alfredo Ellis