Latin America and the United States / Addresses by Elihu Root

by Elihu Root

I am glad to meet you because I think that perhaps to many of you who have been long in this distant land I may bring pleasant memories of cities and farms and homes, left behind many a year ago. But I hope that the new home you have found, the new duties you have taken up, have made you happy, prosperous, useful, full of the ambitions, activities, and satisfactions of life. There have been great changes in the United States of America—of North America, perhaps I must call it,—since most of you left your old homes. When you, Mr. President, left us, we were a debtor nation; we were borrowing money from Europe to develop our own resources, to build up our own country. Most of the money was coming from our English friends. That capital built up our railways to make possible the wonderful development that has made the United States what it is. We had no capital, no time, no energy, to devote to anything but the task before us, to conquer our West and to develop our empty lands. In that distant day, when Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams espoused the cause of the infant republics of South America, we could have no relations with them but those of political sympathy, because we were too concentrated in the work that lay before us at home. Twenty years ago, when that far-seeing and sanguine statesman, Mr. Blaine, inaugurated his South American policy and brought about the first American Conference at Washington, and the establishment of the Bureau of American Republics, we were still a debtor nation, with no surplus capital, and engrossed in doing our work at home. It was still impossible for us to have any relations with South America, except those of political sympathy.

But since Mr. Blaine, times have changed. We have paid our debts; we have become a creditor rather than a debtor nation. We have for the first time within the last ten years begun to accumulate surplus capital, and it has accumulated with a wonderful rapidity,—a surplus capital to enable us to go out and establish new relations with the rest of the world. We now are beginning to be in a position where we can take the same relations towards other countries that England took towards us. We have paid our debts to England; the use of her capital in developing the United States has resulted in great advantage to both of us; and with the payment of the debt there has been left a warm and, I believe, enduring friendship between England and the United States. I should like to see the same kind of friendship between the United States and South America. I should like to see the great surplus capital which we are accumulating in the United States of North America turn southwards, to see it used to develop the vast resources of this country, with mutual advantage to both, so that when the time comes in the future, as it will come, when the people of Argentina, with their resources developed, with their population increased, have accumulated all the capital they need and paid their debts, we shall have had our share both in their development and in their prosperity, and an enduring friendship may exist between us.

Now it has seemed to me, sir, that possibly the opportunity afforded by the kind and courteous invitation of the Argentine Government to visit this country might enable me to do something to this end, just at this juncture when a change in the attitude of the United States toward the rest of the world is taking place, when the change from the debtor to the creditor nation, is made; from the borrower of money to develop resources, to a country with surplus capital to send out to the world;—it seemed to me possible that I might by this visit help to establish the relations which I should like to see existing. I should like to be able to qualify myself to say in the most public way that this is a land to which the poor of all the world, who have enterprise without money, can come and find homes and prosperity, so that by the thousands, by the millions, they may come from the Old World and build up Argentina as they have built up the United States. I feel able to say that this is a shore to which the emigrants from the Old World may come with a certainty of finding homes, occupations, and opportunities for prosperity; that it is a country to which the capital of the United States may come with the certainty that it will be secure, will be protected, and will find profitable employment. I look forward to the time when the wonderful development that is going on here now—not confined alone to this country, but progressing here with an amazing rapidity,—will be as great a wonder to the world as the advance which has taken the United States of North America, expanding from the feeble fringe of colonists along the Atlantic shore to a great nation of eighty millions, stretching from ocean to ocean. Argentina will take some of our markets from us, but what are they? They will be markets she is entitled to; and with her prosperity, and with the right understanding and relations between the two countries, our commercial relations with her will more than take the place of the markets she takes away from us. We have nothing to fear in the growing prosperity of Argentina. We have no cause but for rejoicing in her prosperity; no cause but to aid her in every way in our power in her onward progress; and that I believe to be the sincere desire of the whole of the people of the United States.

Mr. President, a heavy responsibility rests upon the citizen of our country who lives in a foreign land. We can misbehave at home and it makes little difference; but every American citizen in a foreign land, every American citizen in the Argentine Republic, is the representative of his country there. He needs no commission; no power can prevent his holding a commission to represent before all the people of Argentina the character of his own countrymen. You represent our beloved land to the people of Argentina. What you are they will believe us to be. As they study your character and conduct their estimate of us rises, and it is with the greatest pleasure that I find here among this people whom I respect so highly, whose good opinion for my country I so greatly desire, a body of Americans, a body of my countrymen, so worthy, so estimable, so high in reputation, so well fitted to maintain the standard of the United States of America, high, pure, unsullied, worthy of all honor.

BANQUET AT THE OPERA HOUSE

Speech of Dr. Luis M. Drago

President of the Reception Committee

August 17, 1906

The large gathering here assembled, representative of all that Buenos Ayres has of the most notable in science, letters, industry, and commerce, has conferred on me the signal honor of designating me to offer this banquet to the eminent minister of one of the greatest nations of the earth, a nation linked to us from the very beginning by many and very real sentiments of moral and political solidarity. This country has not forgotten that in the trying times of the colonial emancipation, our fathers could rely on the sympathy and the warm and disinterested adhesion of the American people, our predecessors and our guides in the paths of liberty. The thrilling utterances of Henry Clay defending our cause when everything appeared to threaten our revolution, have never been surpassed in their noble eloquence; and it was due to the generosity and foresight of their great statesmen that the United States were the first to receive us with open arms as their equals in the community of sovereign nations.

The spiritual affinity thus happily established has gone on strengthening itself almost imperceptibly ever since by the reproduction of institutions and legal customs.