of their
respective governments, the satisfaction of having promoted some of
these benefits and the honor of a happy initiative, deferentially
received by the illustrious Secretary of State, to whom the oriental
people today offer the testimony of their esteem and sympathy, belong,
at least in part, to the Uruguayan foreign office.

I drink, ladies and gentlemen, to Pan American fraternity, to the
greatness of the United States of North America, to the health of His
Excellency President Roosevelt, to the happiness of Mr. Elihu Root and
of his distinguished family.

REPLY OF MR. ROOT

I have already thanked you for that welcome message which greeted my
first advent in the harbor of Rio de Janeiro. I have now to add my
thanks, both for the gracious invitation which brings me here and for
the surpassing kindness and hospitality with which I and my family have
been welcomed to Montevideo. It is most gratifying to hear from the lips
of one of the masters of South American diplomacy, one who knows the
reality of international politics, so just an estimate of the attitude
of my own country toward her South American sisters. The great
declaration of Monroe, made in the infancy of Latin American liberty,
was an assertion to all the world of the competency of Latin Americans
to govern themselves. That assertion my country has always maintained;
and my presence here is, in part, for the purpose of giving evidence of
her belief that the truth of the assertion has been demonstrated; that,
in the progressive development which attends the course of nations, the
peoples of South America have proved that their national tendencies and
capacities are, and will be, on and ever on in the path of ordered
liberty. I am here to learn more, and also to demonstrate our belief in
the substantial similarity of interests and sympathies of the American
self-governing republics.

You have justly indicated that there is nothing in the growing
friendship between our countries which imperils the interests of those
countries in the Old World from which we have drawn our languages, our
traditions, and the bases of our customs and our laws.

I think it may be safely said that those nations who planted their
feeble colonies on these shores, from which we have spread so widely,
have profited far more from the independence of the American republics
than they would have profited if their unwise system of colonial
government had been continued. In the