nd the most advanced amongst
them should be the one to take the initiative in this union.

Your grand republic, Mr. Secretary of State, is consistent in confiding
to you this mission of fraternity and solidarity with the ideas and
intentions manifested by her at the dawn of the liberty of our
continent. The same sentiment that inspired the Monroe Doctrine brings
you to our shores as the herald of the concord and community of America.

We welcome you most cordially. You find us earnestly laboring to make
justice prevail, enamored of progress, confident in the future. Far
removed from the European continent, whence emerges the wave of humanity
that peoples the American territories and becomes the origin of nations
so glorious as yours, the growth and organization of the peoples in
these regions have been slow; and public and social order has been
frequently upset in our distant and scarcely populated prairies. But in
the midst of these disturbances that have likewise afflicted, in their
epochs of formation, almost all the present best constituted nations,
sound tendencies and true principles of order and liberty prevail,
nationalities are constituted in a definite manner, and republican
institutions are consecrated.

Your great nation, Mr. Secretary of State, is not new to this work. She
has had important participation in it. I do not refer to the Monroe
Doctrine that made the elder sister the zealous defender of the younger
ones. I speak of the radiant example of your republican virtue, your
industrial initiative, your economic development, your scientific
advances, your ardent and virile activity that has reenforced our faith
in right, in liberty, in justice, in the republic, and has animated
us--as a noble and victorious example does animate--in our dark days of
disturbance and disaster.

Yes, the epoch of internal convulsions is drawing to its close in this
part of America, and the peoples, finding themselves organized and at
peace, are dedicating themselves to all those tasks that exalt the human
mind and originate, in modern times, the greatness of nations. You tread
upon a land that has recently been watered abundantly with blood--upon
one in which, nevertheless, the love of liberty, within the limits of
order, the love of well-being, and the love of progress under legal
governments is intense; upon one in which we live earnestly dedicated,
in all branches of activity, to the labor that dignifies and fortifies,