Mr. Chairman, my countrymen, my countrywomen, my friends from the land
whence my fathers came, I need not say that I am glad to meet you. No
one far away from his own land needs to be told that the looks, faces,
the sound of voice, of one's own countrymen are a joy to the wanderer in
strange lands. Yet I do not find this such a strange land. I find here
so many things to remind me of home, so many things that are like our
own country, that it seems a little like coming home. Such is the
similarity in conditions, in spirit, in purpose; such is the impress of
the same institutions and the same principles, that I cannot feel
altogether a stranger; and when I meet you here at home almost I feel
the warmth of my own fireside.
I am glad to meet you because I think that perhaps to many of you who
have been long in this distant land I may bring pleasant memories of
cities and farms and homes, left behind many a year ago. But I hope that
the new home you have found, the new duties you have taken up, have made
you happy, prosperous, useful, full of the ambitions, activities, and
satisfactions of life. There have been great changes in the United
States of America--of North America, perhaps I must call it,--since most
of you left your old homes. When you, Mr. President, left us, we were a
debtor nation; we were borrowing money from Europe to develop our own
resources, to build up our own country. Most of the money was coming
from our English friends. That capital built up our railways to make
possible the wonderful development that has made the United States what
it is. We had no capital, no time, no energy, to devote to anything but
the task before us, to conquer our West and to develop our empty lands.
In that distant day, when Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams espoused the
cause of the infant republics of South America, we could have no
relations with them but those of political sympathy, because we were too
concentrated in the work that lay before us at home. Twenty years ago,
when that far-seeing and sanguine statesman, Mr. Blaine, inaugurated his
South American policy and brought about the first American Conference at
Washington, and the establishment of the Bureau of American Republics,
we were still a debtor nation, with no surplus capital, and engrossed in
doing our work at home. It was still impossible for us to have any
relations with South America, except those of political sympathy.
But since Mr. Blaine, times have changed. We have paid our debts; we
have become a creditor rather than a debtor nation. We have for the
first time within the last ten years begun to accumulate surplus
capital, and it has accumulated with a wonderful rapidity,--a surplus
capital to enable us to go out and establish new relations with the rest
of the world. We now are beginning to be in a position where we can take
the same relations towards other countries that England took towards us.
We have paid our debts to England; the use of her capital in developing
the United States has resulted in great advantage to both of us; and
with the payment of the debt there has been left a warm and, I believe,
enduring friendship between England and the United States. I should like
to see the same kind of friendship between the United States and South
America. I should like to see the great surplus capital which we are
accumulating in the United States of North America turn southwards, to
see it used to develop the vast resources of this country, with mutual
advantage to both, so that when the time comes in the future, as it will
come, when the people of Argentina, with their resources developed, with
their population increased, have accumulated all the capital they need
and paid their debts, we shall have had our share both in their
development and in their prosperity, and an enduring friendship may
exist between us.
Now it has seemed to me, sir, that possibly the opportunity afforded by
the kind and courteous invitation of the Argentine Government to visit
this country might enable me to do something to this end, just at this
juncture when a change in the attitude of the United States toward the
rest of the world is taking place, when the change from the debtor to
the creditor nation, is made; from the borrower of money to develop
resources, to a country with surplus capital to send out to the
world;--it seemed to me possible that I might by this visit help to
establish the relations which I should like to see existing. I should
like to be able to qualify myself to say in the most public way that
this is a land to which the poor of all the world, who have enterprise
without money, can come and find homes and prosperity, so that by the
thousands, by the millions, they may come from the Old World and build
up Argentina as they have built up the United States. I feel able to say
that this is a shore to which the emigrants from the Old World may come
with a certainty of finding homes, occupations, and opportunities for
prosperity; that it is a country to which the capital of the United
States may come with the certainty that it will be secure, will be
protected, and will find profitable employment. I look forward to the
time when the wonderful development that is going on here now--not
confined alone to this country, but progressing here with an amazing
rapidity,--will be as great a wonder to the world as the advance which
has taken the United States of North America, expanding from the feeble
fringe of colonists along the Atlantic shore to a great nation of eighty
millions, stretching from ocean to ocean. Argentina will take some of
our markets from us, but what are they? They will be markets she is
entitled to; and with her prosperity, and with the right understanding
and relations between the two countries, our commercial relations with
her will more than take the place of the markets she takes away from us.
We have nothing to fear in the growing prosperity of Argentina. We have
no cause but for rejoicing in her prosperity; no cause but to aid her in
every way in our power in her onward progress; and that I believe to be
the sincere desire of the whole of the people of the United States.
Mr. President, a heavy responsibility rests upon the citizen of our
country who lives in a foreign land. We can misbehave at home and it
makes little difference; but every American citizen in a foreign land,
every American citizen in the Argentine Republic, is the representative
of his country there. He needs no commission; no power can prevent his
holding a commission to represent before all the people of Argentina the
character of his own countrymen. You represent our beloved land to the
people of Argentina. What you are they will believe us to be. As they
study your character and conduct their estimate of us rises, and it is
with the greatest pleasure that I find here among this people whom I
respect so highly, whose good opinion for my country I so greatly
desire, a body of Americans, a body of my countrymen, so worthy, so
estimable, so high in reputation, so well fitted to maintain the
standard of the United States of America, high, pure, unsullied, worthy
of all honor.