Yielding to the generous impulses of your American heart, and of your brain of a thinker and of a statesman, you have felt a desire, Mr. Root, to visit these countries, to address to them words of friendship and of interest in their welfare, in the name of the honorable government which you represent, and to shed over this continent the rays of the noble ideal of American fraternity.
Your visit will undoubtedly produce fruitful results on behalf of liberty and of justice, of peace and of progress, of order and of improvement, which you have proclaimed as being the highest principles inspiring the policy of the United States in the special mission for which their peculiar virtues and energy have marked them out in the destiny of humanity.
When those austere founders of American independence laid the foundations of the great republic of the North, and gave it its constitution, they were not inspired by narrow-minded ideas or by selfish and transitory interest, but by a profound conviction of the rights of man and a deep feeling of liberty and of justice, which, in its irresistible consequences, would bring about the social and political transformation which came to pass in the world at the end of the eighteenth century, and was destined to constitute the gospel of liberty and of democracy in our modern régime.
This same people, although still in its youth, did not hesitate, shortly after, all alone, to guarantee the independence of all the American countries, placing before the great powers of the world the pillars of Hercules of the Monroe Doctrine, forming an impassable gateway to a free and unconquerable America.
Today this same people excites the admiration of the whole world by its grandeur. Its government brings to its level the harmony of humanity; reëstablishes, on the one hand, peace between the empires of Europe and of Asia, and, on the other, between the republics of Central America; patronizes the congress of The Hague, and in it obtains the recognition of the personality of the American nations, thus giving proof of the interest it takes, with equal concern, in the future of the peoples civilized for a century, as well as in that of the countries just commencing their existence. The American Constitution, the Monroe Doctrine, together with the policy of President Roosevelt, and of his Secretary of State, Mr. Root, voice in this manner, through the pages of history, the same language of liberty, of justice, humanity, and Americanism.
How deep is the lesson to be learned from these facts!
The ancient ideas founded right upon force, the régime of the social bodies was that of privilege, and individual efforts were tied by bonds imposed in the name of the authorities. The modern ideas, such as the United States proclaim, found all right upon justice, and the social régime upon liberty and equality. The human being is not an instrument for the display of arbitrary power, but is the whole object of social life, the mission of which is the development of its energies, its moral conscience, the improvement and welfare of individuals and of nations.
According to the ancient ideas, the greatness of the nations was measured by their military power and by the limits of their conquests of force. According to modern ideas, as represented by the United States, the greatness of nations is measured by the conquests obtained by individual and collective efforts, thereby creating the fruitful and happy reign of truth, of justice, of labor, and of peace.
War was formerly a glory; nowadays it is a calamity. Later on it will be condemned as the sad ancestral remains of barbarism and savagery.
The evolution of ideas is that which now rules the world; and if people do not always comprehend this fact it is because the selfish and personal prejudices, passions, and interests disturb and impair their judgment.