civil and
political society, also instinctively group themselves together in order
to form the body, the life, and the thought of the international world.
Just as social life, far from disparaging the essential attributes of
the sacred human person, constitutes the ambient medium necessary to the
life, the development, and the attainment of the inalienable destiny of
man, so this great commonwealth of nations, whose permanent
establishment in America is the earnest desire of the Congress at Rio de
Janeiro, should have as its inviolable basis and essential purpose the
life, the honor, the prosperity, and the glory of the sovereign states
which constitute it.

You have proclaimed democracy, sir, as the most powerful bond which
unites the republics of America. But democracy is nothing else than
the equality of men before the law, and is consequently above all the
triumphant vindication of the right of the weak in their relations
with the strong. Therefore, sir, in pronouncing this name of our
common mother, you did so only in order to proclaim, as the American
ideal in the relations of states, the same noble principle which
governs the relations of free men, and which is the essence of our
being; you proclaimed, then, a species of international American
democracy in the bosom of which all persons should be persons with
full self-consciousness, with an individual destiny independent of the
destiny of others, with the moral and material means to accomplish
this destiny, with freedom, with dignity, and with all the attributes
which characterize and ennoble the person and distinguish it from
inferior beings.

To elevate the moral level of this great international democracy which
you have proclaimed, and of which our America should be the prototype,
there is but one means, namely, to elevate the level of all and every
one of the units which compose it, and to stimulate in all and every one
of them a consciousness of and pride in their own destiny, an undying
love for the abstract idea of country, and a deep conviction that in the
sphere of peoples, just as in that of the orbs, there is no star, no
matter how powerful, which can perturb the gravitation of the other
stars; for over the entire body of the worlds stands the immutable law
which governs them, and over this law is the sovereign will of the
Supreme Legislator of orbs and of souls.

This was the echo in my mind, Mr. Secretary, of what you said at Rio de
Janeiro and