I thank you for the kind and friendly words you have uttered. I thank
you, and all of you for your cordiality and bounteous hospitality. As I
am soon to leave this city, where I and my family have been welcomed so
warmly and have been made so happy, let me take this opportunity to
return to you and to the Government and to the people of Buenos Ayres
our most sincere and heartfelt thanks for all your kindness and goodness
to us. We do appreciate it most deeply, and we shall never forget it,
shall never forget you--your friendly faces, your kind greetings, your
beautiful homes, your noble spirit, and all that makes up the great and
splendid city of Buenos Ayres.
It is with special pleasure, Mr. Chairman, that I have listened to that
part of your speech which relates to the political philosophy of our
times, and especially to the political philosophy most interesting to
America. Upon the two subjects of special international interest to
which you have alluded, I am glad to be able to declare myself in hearty
and unreserved sympathy with you. The United States of America has never
deemed it to be suitable that she should use her army and navy for the
collection of ordinary contract debts of foreign governments to her
citizens. For more than a century the State Department, the Department
of Foreign Relations of the United States of America, has refused to
take such action, and that has become the settled policy of our country.
We deem it to be inconsistent with that respect for the sovereignty of
weaker powers which is essential to their protection against the
aggression of the strong. We deem the use of force for the collection of
ordinary contract debts to be an invitation to abuses, in their
necessary results far worse, far more baleful to humanity than that the
debts contracted by any nation should go unpaid. We consider that the
use of the army and navy of a great power to compel a weaker power to
answer to a contract with a private individual, is both an invitation to
speculation upon the necessities of weak and struggling countries and an
infringement upon the sovereignty of those countries, and we are now, as
we always have been, opposed to it; and we believe that, perhaps not
today nor tomorrow, but through the slow and certain process of the
future, the world will come to the same opinion.
It is with special gratification that I have heard from your lips so
just an estimate of the character of that traditional policy of the
United States which bears the name of President Monroe. When you say
that it was "without accentuating superiority or seeking preponderance,"
that Monroe's declaration condemned the oppression of the nations of
this part of the world and the control of their destinies by the great
powers of Europe, you speak the exact historical truth. You do but
simple justice to the purposes and the sentiments of Monroe and his
compatriots and to the country of Monroe at every hour from that time to
this.
I congratulate you upon the wonderful opportunity that lies before you.
Happier than those of us who were obliged in earlier days to conquer the
wilderness, you men of Argentina have at your hands great, new forces
for your use. Changes have come of recent years in the world which
affect the working out of your problem. One is that through the
comparative infrequency of war, of pestilence, of famine, through the
increased sanitation of the world, the decrease of infant mortality by
reason of better sanitation, the population of the world is increasing.
Those causes which reduced population are being removed and the pressure
of population is sending out wave after wave of men for the peopling of
the vacant lands of the earth. Another change is, that through the
wonderful activity of invention and discovery and organizing capacity
during our lifetime, the power of mankind to produce wealth has been
immensely increased. One man today, with machinery, with steam, with
electricity, with all the myriads of appliances that invention and
discovery have created, can produce more wealth, more of the things that
mankind desires, than twenty men could have produced years ago; and the
result is that vast accumulations of capital are massing in the world,
ready to be poured out for the building up of the vacant places of the
earth. For the utilization of these two great forces, men and money, you
in Argentina have the opportunity of incalculable potential wealth, and
you have the formative power in the spirit and the brain of your people.
I went today to one of your great flour mills and to one of your great
refrigerating plants. I viewed the myriad industries that surround the
harbor, the forests of masts, the thronged steamers. I was interested
and amazed. It far exceeded my imagination and suggested an analogy to
an incident in my past life. It was my fortune in the year when the war
broke out between Prussia and France, to be travelling in Germany.
Immediately upon the announcement of the war, maps of the seat of war
were printed and posted in every shop window. The maps were maps of
Germany, with a little stretch of France. Within a fortnight the armies
had marched off the map. It seems to be so with Argentina. I have read
books about Argentina. I have read magazine and newspaper articles; but
within the last five years you have marched off the map. The books and
magazines are all out of date. What you have done since they were
written is much more than had been done before. They are no guide to the
country. Nevertheless, with all your vast material activity, it seems to
me that the most wonderful and interesting thing to be found here is the
laboratory of life, where you are mixing the elements of the future
race. Argentine, English, German, Italian, French, and Spanish, and
American are all being welded together to make the new type. It was the
greatest satisfaction to me to go into the school and see that first and
greatest agency, the children of all races in the first and most
impressionable period of life, being brought together and acting and
reacting on each other, and all tending toward the new type, which will
embody the characteristics of all; and to know that the system of
schools in which this is being done was, by the wisdom of your great
President Sarmiento, brought from my own country through his friendship
with the great leader of education in the United States of
America--Horace Mann.
Mr. Chairman, I should have been glad to see all these wonderful things
as an inconspicuous observer. It is quite foreign to my habits and to my
nature to move through applauding throngs, accompanied by guards of
honor; yet perhaps it is well that the idea which I represent should be
applauded by crowds and accompanied by guards of honor. The pomp and
circumstance of war attract the fancy of the multitude; the armored
knight moves across the page of romance and of poetry and kindles the
imagination of youth; the shouts of the crowd, the smiles of beauty, the
admiration of youth, the gratitude of nations, the plaudits of mankind,
follow the hero about whom the glamor of military glory dims the eye to
the destruction and death and human misery that follow the path of war.
Perhaps it is well that sometimes there should go to the herdsman on his
lonely ranch, to the husbandman in his field, to the clerk in the
counting-house and the shop, to the student at his books, to the boy in
the street, the idea that there is honor to be paid to those qualities
of mankind which rest upon justice, upon mercy, upon consideration for
the rights of others, upon humanity, upon the patient and kindly spirit,
upon all those exercises of the human heart which lead to happy homes,
to prosperity, to learning, to art, to religion, to the things that
dignify life and ennoble it and give it its charm and grace.
We honor Washington as the leader of his country's forces in the war of
independence; but that supreme patience which enabled him to keep the
warring elements of his people at peace is a higher claim to the
reverence of mankind than his superb military strategy. San Martin was
great in his military achievements; his Napoleonic march across the
Andes is entitled to be preserved in the history of military affairs so
long as history is written; but the almost superhuman self-abnegation
with which he laid aside power and greatness that peace might give its
strength to his people, was greater than his military achievements. The
triumphant march of the conquering hero is admirable and to be greeted
with huzzas, but the conquering march of an idea which makes for
humanity is more admirable and more to be applauded. This is not theory;
it is practical. It has to do with our affairs today; for we are now in
an age of the world when not governors, not presidents, not congresses,
but the people determine the issues of peace or war, of controversy or
of quiet. I am an advocate of arbitration; I am an advocate of
mediation; of all the measures that tend toward bringing reasonable and
cool judgment to take the place of war; but let us never forget that
arbitration and mediation--all measures of that description--are but the
treatment of the symptoms and not the treatment of the cause of disease;
and that the real cure for war is to get into the hearts of the people
and lead them to a just sense of their rights and other people's rights,
lead them to love peace and to hate war, lead them to hold up the hands
of their governments in the friendly commerce of diplomacy, rather than
to urge them on to strife; and let there go to the herdsman and the
husbandman and the merchant and the student and the boy in the street
every influence which can tend toward that sweet reasonableness, that
kindly sentiment, that breadth of feeling for humanity, that
consideration for the rights of others, which lie at the basis of the
peace of the world.