Latin America and the United States / Addresses by Elihu Root

by Elihu Root

Your important labors as a statesman and jurisconsult do not call forth our admiration any the less.

The jurisconsult of our days is not only he who in the Roman Forum ex solio tanquam ex tripode solved the conflicts which arose from the applying of the law; because now the part taken by the people in governmental affairs and the ever-increasing necessities of democratic life have widened his sphere of influence, and he has become to society what the lawyer has been to the individual and the family. The jurisconsult is a mentor of nations; in the midst of our eagerness to achieve greater prosperity and in our constant wrestle as citizens to form part of the public administration, he it is who points out the path of our social and political life, and has to dictate the laws which should conform to our customs as well as those which should be necessary to determine its evolution. He it is who, standing in the prow, with gaze fixed on the distant horizon, steers the ship through the paths which guide nations to the haven of greater prosperity.

And you belong to the assembly of jurisconsults who are the glory and pride of the American continent.

Still fresh in men's minds are the honors you reaped in Yale University with the course of lectures you delivered on the part to be taken by citizens in the government. Your lessons have taught what are the rights to be exercised by citizens in nations ruled by democratic institutions and what their duties in order that governments should be the true representatives of the people's will.

But again, the academy deems it but just to accord all honor to the great orator whose voice all America has been heeding with universal approval for more than a year; heeding, because that voice has ever been the expression of the lofty ideals which America has been pursuing from the earliest days of her freedom and independence.

Nor is your eloquence the fruit of meditation and study; it savors not, like that of Demosthenes, of the midnight oil. It is fresh and spontaneous, such as ought to be at the command of men ever ready to speak to the people of their rights and duties in democracies. It abounds always in that cold reasoning and that inflexible logic which alone can persuade and convince.

But your eloquence contains, besides, all the warmth, all the majesty, and all the sparkle of the Latin eloquence.

Plutarch relates, in his life of Cicero, that when the great orator thrilled the inhabitants of Rhodes with his speeches, Apollonius Molon, after listening to him one day, showed no sign of admiration, but that when Cicero had finished he said: "Cicero, I, no less than the others, praise and admire thee; but I weep for the fate of Greece, for thou hast taken to Rome the best that was left to Greece—wisdom and eloquence."

We in Latin America, less selfish than Apollonius Molon, do not weep; rather do we cheer and reward the orator from whose lips we have heard resound the accents of the Latin eloquence.

The Mexican Academy of Legislation and Jurisprudence, on presenting you today with the diploma which confers upon you the degree of honorary member, has desired to make known to the whole country your undoubted merits as lawyer, jurisconsult, and orator, and on this solemn occasion to bestow upon you its highest possible distinction.