I beg you to believe that I am highly appreciative of the cordial and hospitable greeting with which I have been received by you on the threshold of your beautiful and wonderful country. I hope that the visit which now begins will not merely give me personally the opportunity I have long desired, to see this great country and its marvels, to meet its public men, and especially to see its illustrious President. I hope that it will also serve, as it is intended to serve, as evidence of the desire of the government and people of the United States to strengthen and increase the steadfast friendship which they have long felt for the people and government of Mexico.
CITY OF MEXICO
Speech of Porfirio Díaz
President of the Republic
At a Banquet at the National Palace, October 2, 1907
In the name of the Mexican people and of their government I tender you this banquet, acknowledging thereby those sentiments of sympathy which are felt and which distinguish one and another, the people of the United States, the great citizen who presides over its high destinies, and the illustrious statesman who honors us with his interesting and very welcome visit. Bonds of sympathy and fellow-feeling, Mr. Secretary, which are not new, but which germinated in the breasts of our fathers at the inception of the independence of our country, our fathers who contemplated with patriotic enthusiasm the daring exploits in war and imitated the political examples set by your heroic liberators; sentiments which we, of subsequent generations, have also cultivated; because, in studying the causes which produce the prodigious national prosperity with which your country has astounded the world, we become accustomed to admire, to magnify perhaps, the indomitable will, energy, labor, and civic and patriotic solidarity which constitute the energetic and abundantly productive type of your countrymen.
The Mexican people, Mr. Secretary, are honored as well as pleased to have you in their midst—honored, because you are the fountain of honor as a noted statesman of our century, and highly pleased because your clear and rapid conception promises us that, seeing with your own eyes the kind and well-merited feelings with which we harbor your countrymen who seek in our land the generous treatment proportionate to their intelligence, perseverance, and indefatigable labor, you may affirm that in Mexico we profess ideas which, carried out in cordial reciprocity, must make happy and loyal friends the two nations which are united by contiguity.
In conclusion, gentlemen, I extend my thanks to the distinguished ladies who have had the kindness to honor and embellish our tables with their presence; and permit me to invite you to drink with them and with me, hoping that the national harmonizing of individual rights and just liberties, which is called the United States of America, may be perpetuated in its increasing moral and material progress, which has given prestige throughout the world to government by popular representation.
I drink also to the personal happiness of that great friend of universal peace, president of the grand republic, the Honorable Theodore Roosevelt, and to the hope that our illustrious guest and his lovable family may find in Mexico a reception as pleasing as their interesting visit is to the Mexican people.
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