RESPONSE TO THE TOAST OF THE AMBASSADOR OF BRAZIL AT A DINNER IN HONOR OF REAR-ADMIRAL HUET DE BACELLAR AND THE CAPTAINS OF THE BRAZILIAN SHIPS ON A VISIT TO THE JAMESTOWN EXPOSITION, WASHINGTON, D.C., MAY 18, 1907

The Brazilian Ambassador, His Excellency Mr. Nabuco

This is the second time that I have the honor and the good fortune of meeting in this room the representatives of the American nations in Washington, including the Secretary of State of the United States. These are the great Pan American festivals of the Brazilian Embassy. But what a great stride our common cause has made since we met here last year! All of that progress is principally due to Mr. Root's devotion to the cause that he made his own and which I have no doubt he will make also a national one.

I drink to the progress of the Pan American cause in the person of its great leader, the Secretary of State.

Mr. Root

I thank you, Mr. Ambassador, for the too flattering expression with which you have characterized the efforts that, by the accident of position, I have been enabled to make in the interpretation of that spirit which in the fullness of time has ripened, developed and become ready for universal expression and influence.

It is a great pleasure for me to look again into the tropical forests of Brazil; to come under the magic influence of your part of the solar spectrum; and to be introduced again to the delightful influences of your language through the words of the representative of King Carlos of Portugal.I think any one who is trying to do something is at times—perhaps most of the time—inclined to become despondent, because any single man can do so little. But if the little that one man can do happens to be in the line of national or world tendencies, he may count himself happy in helping forward the great work.

How many thousands of men, born out of time, give their lives to causes which are not ripe for action! I think that we, my friends, are doing our little; happy in contributing to a cause that has fully ripened. I confess that in passing from the courts to diplomacy; from the argument of causes, the conclusion of which would be enforced by the power of the marshal or the sheriff, having behind him the irresistible power of the nation—passing from such arguments to the discussion that proceeds between the foreign offices of independent powers, I found myself groping about to find some sanction for the rules of right conduct which we endeavor to assert and maintain.

It has long been a widely accepted theory that the only sanction for the right conduct of nations, for those rules of conduct which nations seek to enforce upon each other, is the exercise of force; that behind their diplomatic argument rests, as the ultimate argument, the possibility of war. But I think there has been developing in the later years of progress in civilization that other sanction, of the constraining effect of the public opinion of mankind, which rests upon the desire for the approval of one's fellowmen. The progress of which you have spoken, Mr. Ambassador, in American international relations, is a progress along the pathway that leads from the rule of force as the ultimate sanction of argument to the rule of public opinion, which enforces its decrees by an appeal to the desire for approbation among men.

That progress is towards the independence, the freedom, the dignity, the happiness of every small and weak nation. It tends to realize the theory of international law, the real national equality. The process is one of attrition. Isolation among nations leaves no appeal for the enforcement of rules of right conduct, but the appeal to force. Communication, intercourse, friendship, the desire for good opinion, the exercise of all the qualities that adorn, that elevate, that refine human nature, bring to the defense of the smaller nation the appeal to the other sanction, the sanction of public opinion.

What we are doing now, because the time has come for it to be done, is to help in our day and generation in the creation of a public opinion in America which shall approve all that is good in national character and national conduct and punish all that is wrong with that most terrible penalty, the disapproval of all America. As that process approaches its perfection, the work of our friends, of the armies and navies of America, will have been accomplished.

It is not a work of selfishness; it is a work for universal civilization. It is a work by which we will repay to France and Portugal and to Sweden—to all our mother lands across the Atlantic—all the gifts of civilization, of literature, of art, of the results of their long struggles upward from barbarism to light, with which they have endowed us. For in the vast fields of incalculable wealth that the American continents offer to the enterprise and the cultivation of the world, the older nations of Europe will find their wealth, and opportunity for the exercise of their powers in peace and with equality.

It was a great pleasure to me—it was a cause of pride to me—to hear so distinguished an English scholar as the Ambassador from France speak the beautiful language of France so perfectly tonight. It is a great pleasure for me to find that throughout the United States the young men are in constantly increasing numbers learning to speak not only French, but Spanish and Portuguese. It was a great pleasure to find throughout South America last summer so many, not merely of the most distinguished and highly cultivated men, speaking English, but so large a number of the people in the cities that I visited.

It all makes for that attrition, that practical intercourse, which is the process of civilization; and in destroying the isolation, the separation of American states from each other, in building up an American public opinion, we are preparing ourselves the more perfectly to unite with our friends of Europe in a world public opinion, which shall establish the reign of justice and liberty and humanity throughout the world by slow, practical, untiring processes of intercourse and friendship in place of the rules of brutal force.