In the name of the Mexican people and of their government I tender you
this banquet, acknowledging thereby those sentiments of sympathy which
are felt and which distinguish one and another, the people of the
United States, the great citizen who presides over its high destinies,
and the illustrious statesman who honors us with his interesting and
very welcome visit. Bonds of sympathy and fellow-feeling, Mr. Secretary,
which are not new, but which germinated in the breasts of our fathers at
the inception of the independence of our country, our fathers who
contemplated with patriotic enthusiasm the daring exploits in war and
imitated the political examples set by your heroic liberators;
sentiments which we, of subsequent generations, have also cultivated;
because, in studying the causes which produce the prodigious national
prosperity with which your country has astounded the world, we become
accustomed to admire, to magnify perhaps, the indomitable will, energy,
labor, and civic and patriotic solidarity which constitute the energetic
and abundantly productive type of your countrymen.
The Mexican people, Mr. Secretary, are honored as well as pleased to
have you in their midst--honored, because you are the fountain of honor
as a noted statesman of our century, and highly pleased because your
clear and rapid conception promises us that, seeing with your own eyes
the kind and well-merited feelings with which we harbor your countrymen
who seek in our land the generous treatment proportionate to their
intelligence, perseverance, and indefatigable labor, you may affirm that
in Mexico we profess ideas which, carried out in cordial reciprocity,
must make happy and loyal friends the two nations which are united by
contiguity.
In conclusion, gentlemen, I extend my thanks to the distinguished ladies
who have had the kindness to honor and embellish our tables with their
presence; and permit me to invite you to drink with them and with me,
hoping that the national harmonizing of individual rights and just
liberties, which is called the United States of America, may be
perpetuated in its increasing moral and material progress, which has
given prestige throughout the world to government by popular
representation.
I drink also to the personal happiness of that great friend of universal
peace, president of the grand republic, the Honorable Theodore
Roosevelt, and to the hope that our illustrious guest and his lovable
family may find in Mexico a reception as pleasing as their interesting
visit is to the Mexican people.