I thank you sincerely for the flattering expressions which, through your
able and happy spokesmen, you have made regarding myself. I thank you
still more deeply for the expressions of friendship for my country. I
beg you to permit me in my turn to make acknowledgment to you, the
representatives of the people of Brazil--acknowledgment which I can make
to the President of the Republic, which I can make personally to your
distinguished and most able Secretary for Foreign Affairs, but which I
wish to make on this public occasion to the people of Brazil. I wish to
thank the Brazilian people for sending to my country a man so able and
so successful in interpreting his people to us as my good friend Mr.
Nabuco. I wish to thank the people of Brazil--its legislators, its
educated men of literature and of science, its students in their
generous and delightful enthusiasm, and its laboring people in their
simple and honest appreciation--for the reception which they have given
me, overwhelming in its hospitality and friendship; for the courtesy,
the careful attention to every detail that could affect the comfort, the
convenience, and the pleasure of myself and my family; for the abundant
expressions of friendship which I have found in your streets and in your
homes; for the bountiful repasts; for the clouds of beautiful flowers
with which you have surrounded us; and, more than all, for the deep
sense of sincerity in your friendship which has been carried to my
heart. I wish to make this acknowledgment directly to you, the direct
and immediate representatives of the people.
We, who in official life have our short day, are of little consequence.
You and I, Mr. President, Baron Rio Branco, the President of the
Republic himself--we are of little consequence. We come and go. We
cannot alter the course of nations or the fate of mankind; but the
people, the great mass of humanity, are moving up or down. They are
marching on, keeping step with civilization and human progress; or they
are lapsing back toward barbarism and darkness. The people today make
peace and make war--not a sovereign, not the whim of an individual, not
the ambition of a single man; but the sentiment, the friendship, the
affection, the feelings of this great throbbing mass of humanity,
determine peace or war, progress or retrogression. And coming to a
self-governing people from a self-governing people, I would interpret my
fellow-citizens--the great mass of plain people--to the great mass of
the plain people of Brazil. No longer the aristocratic selfishness,
which gathers into a few hands all the goods of life, rules mankind.
Under our free republics our conception of human duty is to spread the
goods of life as widely as possible; to bring the humblest and the
weakest up into a better, a brighter, a happier existence; to lay deep
the foundations of government, so that government shall be built up from
below, rather than brought down from above. These are the conceptions in
which we believe. True, our languages are different; true, we draw from
our parent countries many different customs, different ways of acting
and of thinking; but, after all, the great, substantial, underlying
facts are the same, humanity is the same. We live, we learn, we labor,
and we struggle up to a higher life the same--you of Brazil and we of
the United States of the North. In the great struggle of humanity our
interests are alike, and I hold out to you the hands of the American
people, asking your help and offering you ours in this great struggle of
humanity for a better, a nobler, and a happier life. You will make
mistakes in your council, that is the lot of humanity; no government can
be perfect--till the millennium comes; but year by year and generation
by generation substantial advance toward more perfect government, more
complete order, more exact justice, and more lofty conceptions of human
duty will be made.
God be with you in your struggle as He has been with us. May your
deliberations ever be ruled by patriotism, by unselfishness, by love of
country, and by wisdom for the blessing of your whole people, and may
universal prosperity and growth in wisdom and righteousness of all the
American republics act and react throughout the continents of America
for all time to come.