It is a long way from the Bowery, but I feel quite at home! It is
delightful to feel that my country is represented in this land of beauty
by so many handsome and cheerful-looking men; it is delightful to see
the evidences of prosperity in every American here, and it is delightful
to see that that subtle, indefinable quickening of spirit that comes
from separation has given to each of you, exiles in a foreign land, a
new significance in every star and stripe and every reference to the old
flag and the old home.
Your welcome is very grateful to me; your kind expressions I most
heartily reciprocate. I do not wish to return evil for good by
preaching, but it occurs to me that you have--I will not say that you
have left your country for your country's good--you have not abandoned
your opportunities to serve her; you have rather reached the position
where you have new opportunities for service as American citizens. One
serious fault which formerly existed to a very great extent among
Americans, and which has been growing less, was a certain provincial and
narrow way of looking at foreigners. There was a good deal of truth
underlying the observations and characterizations of Mr. Dickens which
made our people so angry sixty or seventy years ago. One of our American
humorists refers to the people of a western mining camp as looking upon
a newcomer with the idea that he had the defective moral quality of
being a foreigner. Now the residuum of that old feeling stands in the
way of American trade and American intercourse generally with other
nations. No one can do more to hasten the disappearance of that attitude
than you who have experienced the friendship and kindliness of the
people of this foreign country; you who have learned by your personal
experience how many and how noble are the characteristics of this
foreign people; you who have been able to see how much we Americans may
well learn from them; you can, each one of you, be a teacher of your
countrymen in your continued intercourse with your homes and your home
associates in the gospel of courtesy and kindliness toward all mankind.
There is one other thought that comes naturally to my mind. You not only
have not abandoned your duties toward your country by coming to this
foreign land, but you have acquired new duties toward the community and
the nation which has given you welcome and shelter and prosperity. There
is underlying all the materialism and the hard practical sense of the
American people regulating its own government for its own
interests--there is underlying that a certain idealism which carries a
conception of a missionary calling to spread through the length and
breadth of the world the blessing of justice and liberty and of the
institutions which we believe make for human happiness and human
progress. That mission is to be fulfilled, not by making speeches and
the giving of advice, the writing of books, or even the publication of
newspapers; it can best be fulfilled by personal influence and
intercourse of men one with another. No American who is in a foreign
land can help representing his country; its honor and its good name rest
upon each one of us the moment we cross the border. You not only
represent your country, but you have a duty to perform toward the
country in which you live, giving to her and to her people through your
efforts and all your association the best contribution that your
training as American citizens, that the traditions of centuries of
American life enable you to give, toward the maintenance of law and
order, toward the promotion of all ideas that you have been taught in
your youth to consider sacred, toward holding up the hands of authority,
toward the inculcation of the sentiment of loyalty, toward the
perpetuity of the government which gives you security for your lives
and your property in your new home.
I have one prominent thought in meeting you today; it is, while you
continue to be good, loyal American citizens, you should be good and
loyal Mexican residents. I can no better voice the sentiment of all of
my countrymen here I know, and I can no better represent the feelings of
our friends who remain at home, than by asking you to rise and join me
in drinking to the long continuance of life, strength, and usefulness
for the man who, more than any other, or all others, has given you the
opportunities that you now enjoy, President Porfirio Diaz.