, acquired the gift of speaking for herself.
I come because I want to speak of our present and prospective relations
with our neighbors to the south. I deemed it a public duty, as well as a
personal pleasure, to be here to express for myself and for the
Government I represent the welcome we all feel to those who represent
the Latin-American States.

The future, ladies and gentlemen, is going to be very different for this
hemisphere from the past. These States lying to the south of us, which
have always been our neighbors, will now be drawn closer to us by
innumerable ties, and, I hope, chief of all by the tie of a common
understanding of each other. Interest does not tie nations together; it
sometimes separates them. But sympathy and understanding does unite
them, and I believe that by the new route that is just about to be
opened, while we physically cut two continents asunder, we spiritually
unite them. It is a spiritual union which we seek.

I wonder if you realize, I wonder if your imaginations have been filled
with the significance of the tides of commerce. Your Governor alluded in
very fit and striking terms to the voyage of Columbus, but Columbus took
his voyage under compulsion of circumstances. Constantinople had been
captured by the Turks, and all the routes of trade with the East had
been suddenly closed. If there was not a way across the Atlantic to open
those routes again, they were closed forever; and Columbus set out not
to discover America, for he did not know that it existed, but to
discover the eastern shores of Asia. He set sail for Cathay and stumbled
upon America. With that change in the outlook of the world, what
happened? England, that had been at the back of Europe with an unknown
sea behind her, found that all things had turned as if upon a pivot and
she was at the front of Europe; and since then all the tides of energy
and enterprise that have issued out of Europe have seemed to be turned
westward across the Atlantic. But you will notice that they have turned
westward chiefly north of the Equator, and that it is the northern half
of the globe that has seemed to be filled with the media of intercourse
and of sympathy and of common understanding.

Do you not see now what is about to happen? These great tides which have
been running along parallels of latitude will now swing southward
athwart parallels of latitude, and that opening gate at the Isthmus of
Panama will open the world to a commerce