Usage devolves upon me as the head of the Foreign Office of the country
in which you are assembled to call this meeting together; to call it to
order and to preside during the formation of your organization. I wish
to express to you, at the outset, the high appreciation of the
Government of the United States of the compliment you pay to us in
selecting the city of Washington as the field of your labors in behalf
of the rule of peace and order and brotherhood among the peoples of
Central America. It is most gratifying to the people of the United
States that you should feel that you will find here an atmosphere
favorable to the development of the ideas of peace and unity, of
progress and mutual helpfulness, in place of war and revolution and the
retardation of the principles of liberty and justice.
So far as a sincere and friendly desire for success in your labors may
furnish a favorable atmosphere, you certainly will have it here. The
people of the United States are sincere believers in the principles that
you are seeking to apply to the conduct of your international affairs in
Central America. They sincerely desire the triumph and the control of
the principles of liberty and order everywhere in the world. They
especially desire that the blessings which follow the control of those
principles may be enjoyed by all the people of our sister republics on
the western hemisphere, and we further believe that it will be, from the
most selfish point of view, for our interests to have peaceful,
prosperous, and progressive republics in Central America.
The people of the United Mexican States and of the United States of
America are now enjoying great benefits from the mutual interchange of
commerce and friendly intercourse between the two countries of Mexico
and the United States. Prosperity, the increase of wealth, the success
of enterprise--all the results that come from the intelligent use of
wealth--are being enjoyed by the people of both countries, through the
friendly intercourse that utilizes for the people of each country the
prosperity of the other. We in the United States should be most happy if
the states of Central America might move with greater rapidity along the
pathway of such prosperity, of such progress; to the end that we may
share, through commerce and friendly intercourse, in your new
prosperity, and aid you by our prosperity.
We cannot fail, gentlemen, to be admonished by the many failures which
have been made by the people of Central America to establish agreement
among themselves which would be lasting, that the task you have before
you is no easy one. The trial has often been made and the agreements
which have been elaborated, signed, ratified, seem to have been written
in water. Yet I cannot resist the impression that we have at last come
to the threshold of a happier day for Central America. Time is necessary
to political development. I have great confidence in the judgment that
in the long course of time, through successive steps of failure, through
the accompanying education of your people, through the encouraging
examples which now, more than ever before, surround you, success will be
attained in securing unity and progress in other countries of the new
hemisphere. Through the combination of all these, you are at a point in
your history where it is possible for you to take a forward step that
will remain.
It would ill become me to attempt to propose or suggest the steps which
you should take; but I will venture to observe that the all-important
thing for you to accomplish is that while you enter into agreements
which will, I am sure, be framed in consonance with the most peaceful
aspirations and the most rigid sense of justice, you shall devise also
some practical methods under which it will be possible to secure the
performance of those agreements. The mere declaration of general
principles, the mere agreement upon lines of policy and of conduct, are
of little value unless there be practical and definite methods provided
by which the responsibility for failing to keep the agreement may be
fixed upon some definite person, and the public sentiment of Central
America brought to bear to prevent the violation. The declaration that a
man is entitled to his liberty would be of little value with us in this
country, were it not for the writ of habeas corpus that makes it the
duty of a specific judge, when applied to, to inquire into the cause of
a man's detention, and set him at liberty if he is unjustly detained.
The provision which declares that a man should not be deprived of his
property without due process of law would be of little value were it not
for the practical provision which imposes on specific officers the duty
of nullifying every attempt to take away a man's property without due
process of law.
To find practical definite methods by which you shall make it somebody's
duty to see that the great principles you declare are not violated, by
which if an attempt be made to violate them the responsibility may be
fixed upon the guilty individual--those, in my judgment, are the
problems to which you should specifically and most earnestly address
yourselves.
I have confidence in your success because I have confidence in your
sincerity of purpose, and because I believe that your people have
developed to the point where they are ready to receive and to utilize
such results as you may work out. Why should you not live in peace and
harmony? You are one people in fact; your citizenship is
interchangeable--your race, your religion, your customs, your laws, your
lineage, your consanguinity and relations, your social connections, your
sympathies, your aspirations, and your hopes for the future are the
same.
It can be nothing but the ambition of individuals who care more for
their selfish purposes than for the good of their country, that can
prevent the people of the Central American states from living together
in peace and unity.
It is my most earnest hope, it is the hope of the American Government
and people, that from this conference may come the specific and
practical measures which will enable the people of Central America to
march on with equal step abreast of the most progressive nations of
modern civilization; to fulfill their great destinies in that
brotherhood which nature has intended them to preserve; to exile forever
from that land of beauty and of wealth incalculable the fraternal strife
which has hitherto held you back in the development of your
civilization.