are confirming among us. Your words were great and good
because they were yours, without any doubt; but they were so, above all,
because they were in accord with the ideal of justice in pursuit of
which humanity is slowly marching--with that solemn diapason hung
between heaven and earth which furnishes the pitch from time to time to
men and peoples and worlds, in order that they may not depart from the
universal harmony.

Your words have reverberated like a friendly voice in the depths of the
soul of this people, which has acclaimed you without reserve because it
has understood you, sir. And for this reason, because I have thought
that I interpreted all the generous intensity of your attitude and of
your speeches, I have not told you at this time, as would have appeared
natural, how much we in Uruguay love and admire your wonderful American
country, whose stars shine perhaps without precedent in the sky of human
history, but rather how much we respect and with what a passion we love
our good Uruguayan mother-country, whose sun is also a star; how glad we
are to see it honored by your visit, and how we cherish the hope that
you will bear away a remembrance of us as a sincerely friendly people--a
people very conscious of its own destinies, of its rights, and of its
duties; in a word, a people very much in accord with that grand harmony
which exists among sovereign states which respect and love one another,
and which you have proclaimed in the name of your country as the supreme
ideal of our free America.

Ladies and gentlemen, let us fill our glasses with the most generous
wine, with the wine which most gladdens and cheers the heart of
man--with the wine of hope--and let us drink to the health of our
illustrious guest and messenger who represents here the intelligence and
the thought of the heart, and to the health of his wife and daughter,
who are the amiable symbol thereof; to the greater brilliancy of the
stars of his country, our glorious friend; to the realization, on the
American continent and throughout the world, of his exalted ideas of
peace, fraternity, and justice.

REPLY OF MR. ROOT

I am deeply sensible of the honor you confer upon me and upon my family
by this bounteous, hospitable, and graceful festival. It is a special
honor that the banquet to which we are invited should be presided over
by a gentleman who has such high esteem in the public life of your own
country; that the flattering, the too fla