, in spirit, in purpose; such is the impress of
the same institutions and the same principles, that I cannot feel
altogether a stranger; and when I meet you here at home almost I feel
the warmth of my own fireside.

I am glad to meet you because I think that perhaps to many of you who
have been long in this distant land I may bring pleasant memories of
cities and farms and homes, left behind many a year ago. But I hope that
the new home you have found, the new duties you have taken up, have made
you happy, prosperous, useful, full of the ambitions, activities, and
satisfactions of life. There have been great changes in the United
States of America--of North America, perhaps I must call it,--since most
of you left your old homes. When you, Mr. President, left us, we were a
debtor nation; we were borrowing money from Europe to develop our own
resources, to build up our own country. Most of the money was coming
from our English friends. That capital built up our railways to make
possible the wonderful development that has made the United States what
it is. We had no capital, no time, no energy, to devote to anything but
the task before us, to conquer our West and to develop our empty lands.
In that distant day, when Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams espoused the
cause of the infant republics of South America, we could have no
relations with them but those of political sympathy, because we were too
concentrated in the work that lay before us at home. Twenty years ago,
when that far-seeing and sanguine statesman, Mr. Blaine, inaugurated his
South American policy and brought about the first American Conference at
Washington, and the establishment of the Bureau of American Republics,
we were still a debtor nation, with no surplus capital, and engrossed in
doing our work at home. It was still impossible for us to have any
relations with South America, except those of political sympathy.

But since Mr. Blaine, times have changed. We have paid our debts; we
have become a creditor rather than a debtor nation. We have for the
first time within the last ten years begun to accumulate surplus
capital, and it has accumulated with a wonderful rapidity,--a surplus
capital to enable us to go out and establish new relations with the rest
of the world. We now are beginning to be in a position where we can take
the same relations towards other countries that England took towards us.
We have paid our debts to England; the use of her capital in