Latin America and the United States Part 14

In the National a.s.sembly, at Panama, September 21, 1906

You have just visited the wealthiest capitals of South America, real emporiums of its richness; there you have been received with great magnificence. Our outward manifestations of joy on the occasion of your visit may, therefore, appear to you very humble; but you can rest a.s.sured that none of them will surpa.s.s us in the intensity of sympathetic feeling toward your person and toward the n.o.ble American people that you so worthily represent.

We Panamanians always remember with grat.i.tude the interest we inspired in you from the very first days of our national existence, and we bear in mind very specially your timely speech delivered before the Union League Club of Chicago,[4] when our destiny was pending on the scales of a decision of your Senate; and therefore we avail ourselves of this joyful opportunity to receive you with the cordiality due to an old and good friend.

It has been, and it is yet, the vehement desire of your country to bring into closer ties, as far as possible, its political and commercial relations with the Latin American countries. The similarity of traditions and inst.i.tutions, the vicinity and continuity of their territories, and the vast field of commercial expansion which they offer, fully justify that natural, legitimate desire, which is also mutually beneficial; but there being between yours and the latter countries essential differences of language, race, disposition, and education, there is bound to exist in them the suspicion which is naturally engendered by the unknown, and thus it is that the first steps taken toward the accomplishment of your desire should have been the removal of that suspicion by means of friendly intercourse and mutual acquaintance.

With the tact brought forth by your vast intelligence and learning, you fully understood that those do not love each other well who are not intimately acquainted; and it is owing to this fact that you decided to come in person to visit and to know the Latin Americans by your own observation and study. No doubt you carry with you a joyful impression of the progress and n.o.bleness of disposition of our southern brothers, together with the a.s.surance that your mission will achieve a new and splendid triumph for that American diplomacy whereof you are the skilled director, and the princ.i.p.al object of which is the accomplishment of the desire of which I have already spoken.

Being desirous to cooperate in the aims you have in view and with the hope of dispelling certain existing misunderstandings concerning the motives and intentions which originated our present pleasant relations, in a statement which I recently addressed to your government through its minister plenipotentiary here, I recounted the historical events which engendered our national existence and those special relations which link us to your country, in order that when the seal of diplomatic silence is removed, and that statement becomes public property, the world may know, through the unimpeachable testimony of history, that only ideals of the highest altruism served as a guide to the foundation of our republic and to the celebration of the treaty concerning the construction of the interoceanic ca.n.a.l for our benefit and _pro mundi beneficio_.

Panama offers you a splendid field to promote the wise international policy which animates your mind. We being of similar conditions to our Latin American brothers, being linked to your country by the closest ties that can exist between two independent nations, you having the means of exerting decisive influence upon our future life and we being situated in the constant path of universal transit, shall be an evident, s.h.i.+ning example of the benefit which your country can confer upon the countries of our race.

The fruits of your influence are already felt and seen. Peace, which we consider a blessing, is a permanent fact. Under its shelter, and under the a.s.surances given us by your ill.u.s.trious President in his famous letter of October 18, 1904, addressed to the Secretary of War, Panama has entered with firm step upon the path of material, intellectual, and moral development. Those who knew us a little over two years ago, disheartened and ruined by bad government and civil war, and see today the change that has taken place in such a short time, carry to the north and south the gratifying news of our regeneration and thereby contribute to dispel unfounded suspicions regarding yourselves.

These good results are the forerunners of greater benefits in the future, and of the effect of the cooperation of the agents of your government in the progress of the country in general, of their friendly and timely advice, and of their decided moral support whenever there has been need thereof.

I will profit by this opportunity to convey to you the grat.i.tude of the government and people of Panama for the special consideration which has been extended to them by the government of your country. This has been evidenced princ.i.p.ally by the diplomatic staff sent to us, from the very able Honorable William I. Buchanan, your first minister plenipotentiary, to the popular Honorable Charles E. Magoon, who can hardly be replaced, and whose separation from the post he occupies with general satisfaction has caused great regret in the country; and later you sent us, doing us an unmerited honor, in the first place, by special order of your very n.o.ble President, your Secretary of War, Honorable William H.

Taft, who established the relations between our two countries on the happy basis of mutual cordiality and justice, on which they are now established; and now, Mr. Secretary, you do us the great honor of coming yourself on a visit, placing us on a level with the powerful Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay; and, furthermore, which appears to be the extreme limit of what is possible, you allow us to look forward to the coming visit of your great President, the most distinguished of existing rulers--a special honor which has not been vouchsafed even to the most powerful nations of the world. Panama, overwhelmed with so many marks of appreciation, will preserve them as an everlasting remembrance of grat.i.tude toward your n.o.ble country; and in return, though it be but partial, we will follow your advice, we will cooperate without reserve and with enthusiasm in the great work of the interoceanic ca.n.a.l, which is bound to be the most magnificent monument of the grandeur of your people; and we will likewise support you in the mission of American brotherhood which you have undertaken, founding a nation which shall distinguish itself by its love of work, of honor, of order, and of justice.

REPLY OF MR. ROOT

I thank you for your kind welcome to me and for the friends.h.i.+p to my country expressed in that welcome, and I thank you for the honor conferred upon me by this reception in the legislative body which is charged with the government of this republic. You have truly said, sir, that I am deeply interested in the affairs of the people of Panama. At the time of the events which led to your independence, I studied your history carefully and thoroughly from original doc.u.ments, in order to determine in my own mind what the course of my country ought to be. From that study have resulted a keen sense of the manifold injuries and injustices under which the people of Panama have suffered in years past, a strong sympathy with you in your efforts and aspirations toward a better condition, a fervent hope for your prosperity and welfare.

It is with the greatest pleasure that I have heard the expressions of friends.h.i.+p for my country, because of my feeling toward you and because of the special relations which exist between the two countries. We are engaged together in the prosecution of a great, a momentous enterprise--an enterprise which has been the dream not only of the early navigators who first colonized your coasts, but of the most progressive of mankind for four centuries. Its successful accomplishment will make Panama the very center of the world's trade; you will stand upon the greatest highway of commerce; more than the ancient glories of the isthmus will be restored; and there lies before you in the future of this successful enterprise wealth, prosperity, the opportunity for education, for cultivation, and for intercourse with all the world such as has never before been brought to any people. The success of the enterprise will unite the far-separated Atlantic and Pacific coasts in my country; it will give to us the credit of great deeds done, and make the Atlantic and Pacific for us as but one ocean; and the success of this enterprise will give to the world a new highway of commerce and the possibility of a distinct and enormous advance in that communication between nations which is the surest guaranty of peace and civilization.

The achievement of this work is to be accomplished by us jointly. You furnish the country, the place, the soil, the atmosphere, the surrounding population among which the people who do the work are to live and where the work is to be maintained. We furnish the capital and the trained constructive ability which has grown up in the course of centuries of development of the northern continent. The work is difficult and delicate; the two peoples, the Anglo-American and the Spanish-American, are widely different in their traditions, their laws, their customs, their methods of thinking and speaking and doing business. It often happens that we misunderstand each other; it often happens that we fail to appreciate your good qualities and that you fail to appreciate ours; and that with perfectly good intentions, with the best of purposes and kindliest of feelings, we clash, we fail to understand each other, we get at cross purposes, and misconception and discord are liable to arise. Let us remember this in all our intercourse; let us be patient with each other; let us believe in the sincerity of our mutual good purposes and kindly feelings, and be patient and forbearing each with the other, so that we may go on together in the accomplishment of this great enterprise; together bring it to a successful conclusion; together share in the glory of the great work done and in the prosperity that will come from the result.

Mr. President and gentlemen, let me a.s.sure you that in the share which the United States is taking and is to take in this work, there is and can be but one feeling and one desire toward the people of Panama. It is a feeling of friends.h.i.+p sincere and lasting; it is a feeling of strong desire that wisdom may control the deliberations of this a.s.sembly; that judgment and prudence and love of country may rule in all your councils and may control all your actions; it is a desire and a firm purpose that so far as in us lies, there shall be preserved for you the precious boon of free self-government. We do not wish to govern you or interfere in your government, because we are larger and stronger; we believe that the principle of liberty and the rights of men are more important than the size of armies or the number of battles.h.i.+ps. Your independence which we recognized first among the nations of the earth, it is our desire to have maintained inviolate. Believe this, be patient with us, as we will be patient with you; and I hope, I believe, that at some future day we shall all be sailing through the ca.n.a.l together, congratulating each other upon our share in that great and beneficent work.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] "The Ethics of the Panama Question"; address before the Union League Club of Chicago, February 22, 1904--see _Addresses on International Subjects_, pp. 175-206, published by the Harvard University Press.

COLOMBIA

CARTAGENA

ADDRESS OF THE MINISTER FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS, HIS EXCELLENCY VaSQUEZ-COBO

At a Breakfast given to Mr. Root, September 24, 1906

Upon receiving your excellency within the confines of our heroic and glorious Cartagena, I present to you a cordial greeting of welcome, in the name of Colombia, of his excellency the President of the Republic, and in my own.

You return to your own country to enjoy merited honors and laurels after a long tour, giving a hearty embrace of friends.h.i.+p to our sisters, the republics of the South; and in breaking your journey upon our burning sh.o.r.es we receive you as the herald of peace, of justice, and of concord with which the great republic of the North greets the American continent. I trust to G.o.d that these walls, the austere witnesses of our glory, will serve as a monument whereby this visit may be noted in history.

The honorable Minister Barrett, the worthy and estimable representative of your excellency's Government, has just completed a journey through a large part of our vast territory; he, better than any one, will be able to tell your excellency what he has seen in our beautiful and fertile valleys and mountains, in our flouris.h.i.+ng cities and fields, and among our five millions of l.u.s.ty, high-minded, peace-loving, and hard-working inhabitants, who today think only of peace and useful and honest toil.

This is the nation that greets you today and with loyalty and frankness clasps the hand of her sister of the North.

Mr. Secretary, upon thanking you for the honor of this visit, I fervently pray that a happy outcome may crown your efforts in the great work of American fraternity, and I drink to the prosperity and greatness of the United States, to its President, and especially to your excellency.

REPLY OF MR. ROOT

Believe, I beg you, in the sincerity of my appreciation and my thanks for the courtesy with which you have received me, and for the honor which you have shown me. When the suggestion was made that upon my return from a voyage encircling the continent of South America, I should stop at Cartagena for an interview with you, sir, before returning to my own country, I accepted with alacrity and with pleasure, because it was most grateful to me to testify by my presence upon your sh.o.r.es to my high respect for your great country, the country of Bolivar; to my sincere desire that all questions which exist between the United States of Colombia and the United States of America may be settled peacefully, in the spirit of friends.h.i.+p, of mutual esteem, and with honor to both countries. Especially, also, I was glad to come to Colombia as an evidence of my esteem and regard for that n.o.ble and great man whom it is the privilege of Colombia to call her President today--General Reyes. I have had the privilege of personal acquaintance with him, and I look upon his conduct of affairs in the chief magistracy of your republic with the twofold interest of one who loves his fellowmen and desires the prosperity and happiness of the people of Colombia, and of a personal regard and friends.h.i.+p for the President himself.

I have been much gratified during my visit to so many of the republics of South America to find universally the spirit of a new industrial and commercial awakening, to find a new era of enterprise and prosperity dawning in the southern continent.

Mr. Minister and gentlemen, it will be the cause of sincere happiness to me if through the present friendly relations, based upon personal knowledge acquired here, I may do something toward helping the republic of Colombia forward along the pathway of the new development of South America. With your vast agricultural and mineral wealth, with the incalculable richness of your domain, the wealth and prosperity of Colombia are sure to come some time. Let us hope that they will come while we are yet living, in order that you may transfer to your children not the possibility but the realization of the increased greatness of your country. Let us hope that some advance of this new era of progress may come from the pleasant friends.h.i.+ps formed today. While I return my thanks to you for your courtesy, let me a.s.sure you that there is nothing that could give greater pleasure to the President and to the people of the United States of America than to feel that they may have some part in promoting the prosperity and the happiness of this sister republic.

I ask you to join me in drinking to the peace, the prosperity, the order, the justice, the liberty of the republic of Colombia, and long life and a prosperous career in office to its President--General Reyes.

THE VISIT TO MEXICO

Following Secretary Root's visit to South America, with its auspicious results, the President of Mexico, Porfirio Diaz, extended an official invitation to visit the republic immediately to the south of us, in the belief that such a visit would have equally happy results in strengthening and increasing the "steadfast friends.h.i.+p" existing between the two neighboring nations.

Mr. Root, together with his wife and daughter, started for Mexico by special train, arriving in San Antonio on September 28, 1907. On the evening of the day of his arrival in San Antonio, a banquet was tendered to Mr. Root and the Mexican Committee which had come to San Antonio to welcome him and escort him into their country.

On Sunday the 29th, the Root party, together with the Mexican Committee, proceeded across the boundary into Mexico, and were met at the station of Nuevo Laredo by a Mexican delegation. Thence they continued to Mexico City, where the honors extended to Mr. Root were in keeping with the traditional hospitality of the ancient capital of the Montezumas. During his stay the degree of honorary member of the Mexican Academy of Legislation and Jurisprudence was conferred upon him.

A Mexican publication of 314 pages, ent.i.tled _El Senor Root en Mexico_, contains in parallel Spanish and English columns a detailed account of the visit, which extended from September 28 to October 16. It is to be regretted that this volume is defective in that many of the speeches made during the visit are not fully reported. It is possible, however, to gather from those which have been preserved, a keen sense of the cordial reception accorded him by the officials and representative citizens of the republic, and the earnest and eloquent terms in which he reciprocated the expressions of regard for his country and of appreciation of his own services to his country and the world.

The most progressive epoch in Mexico's history was the thirty years of Diaz's supremacy; and it was in the heyday of that period that Mr. Root made his visit to Mexico and paid to President Diaz the tributes which appear in the following pages. During these thirty years, he was always a firm friend of the United States, and no diplomatic misunderstandings arose which were not peaceably adjusted in a spirit of neighborly friends.h.i.+p. Diaz shares with President Roosevelt the honor of submitting the first international controversy to the Hague Tribunal of Arbitration for determination, in what is known as "The Pious Fund of the Californias."

THE VISIT TO MEXICO

SAN ANTONIO

SPEECH OF MR. ROOT

At a Banquet of the International Club in Honor of Mr. Root and the Mexican Envoys, September 28, 1907