I thank you, Mr. President, for your kind reception, and I beg you to permit me to ask the gentlemen here to join me in proposing in behalf of President Roosevelt the health and long life and prosperity of the President of Peru.
BANQUET OF THE MINISTER FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS
SPEECH OF HIS EXCELLENCY JAVIER PRADO Y UGARTECHE
With the liveliest feelings of consideration and sympathy I have the honor to offer this manifestation to His Excellency Mr. Elihu Root, Secretary of State of the United States of America.
Yielding to the generous impulses of your American heart, and of your brain of a thinker and of a statesman, you have felt a desire, Mr. Root, to visit these countries, to address to them words of friendship and of interest in their welfare, in the name of the honorable government which you represent, and to shed over this continent the rays of the noble ideal of American fraternity.
Your visit will undoubtedly produce fruitful results on behalf of liberty and of justice, of peace and of progress, of order and of improvement, which you have proclaimed as being the highest principles inspiring the policy of the United States in the special mission for which their peculiar virtues and energy have marked them out in the destiny of humanity.
When those austere founders of American independence laid the foundations of the great republic of the North, and gave it its constitution, they were not inspired by narrow-minded ideas or by selfish and transitory interest, but by a profound conviction of the rights of man and a deep feeling of liberty and of justice, which, in its irresistible consequences, would bring about the social and political transformation which came to pass in the world at the end of the eighteenth century, and was destined to constitute the gospel of liberty and of democracy in our modern régime.
This same people, although still in its youth, did not hesitate, shortly after, all alone, to guarantee the independence of all the American countries, placing before the great powers of the world the pillars of Hercules of the Monroe Doctrine, forming an impassable gateway to a free and unconquerable America.
Today this same people excites the admiration of the whole world by its grandeur. Its government brings to its level the harmony of humanity; reëstablishes, on the one hand, peace between the empires of Europe and of Asia, and, on the other, between the republics of Central America; patronizes the congress of The Hague, and in it obtains the recognition of the personality of the American nations, thus giving proof of the interest it takes, with equal concern, in the future of the peoples civilized for a century, as well as in that of the countries just commencing their existence. The American Constitution, the Monroe Doctrine, together with the policy of President Roosevelt, and of his Secretary of State, Mr. Root, voice in this manner, through the pages of history, the same language of liberty, of justice, humanity, and Americanism.