It is not, then, a diplomatic representation; it is not an embassy. It is the Government of the United States itself in person, in one of its predominant organs--an organ so exalted that it holds almost as high a position there in the national sentiment as the Presidency itself. For the first time is the North American Union visiting another part of the continent--Latin America. And this direct, personal and most solemn visit of one America to the other has now as its scene the Brazilian Senate, assuming, within the brief dimensions of this chamber, the magnificent proportions of a picture for which our nation constitutes the frame and the attentive circle of the nations the gallery.
For the modest importance of our nation, the event is of incomparable significance. None other can be likened to it in the history of our existence as a republic. After sixteen years of embarrassments, perils, and conflicts, the latter appears to be receiving its final consecration in this solemnity. It is the grand recognition of our democracy, the proclamation of the attainment of our majority as a republic. The stability of the government, its prestige, its honor and its vigor, could not have received a greater attestation before the world. Replying to the doubts, the negations, and the affronts with which our '89 was received, amidst passions at home and prejudices abroad, it signifies the irrevocable triumph of our revolution, closes forever the era of monarchical reassertions and opens up our future to order, confidence, and labor.
Almost all of us who compose this assembly, Mr. President, belong to that generation who were opening their eyes to public life, or were preparing for it by their higher studies, when the struggle was going on in the United States between slavery and freedom--that campaign of Titans which tore the entrails of America and shook the globe for many years.
Washington, Jefferson, and Madison had died, despairing of the extinction of slavery. This being openly proclaimed as the corner stone of the Confederacy, which gloried in having as its basis and in holding as a supreme truth the subjection by Providence of one race to the other, it looked as if the work of the patriarchs of 1787 was doomed to inevitable destruction against the black rock, thus consummating the Jeffersonian prophecy.