ss of development has
reached a point of transition. In the fifty years, from 1850 to 1900, we
received on our shores nearly twenty million immigrants from the Old
World. We borrowed from the Old World thousands of millions of dollars;
and with the strong arm of the immigrants and with the capital from the
Old World, we have threaded the country with railroads, we have
constructed great public works, we have created the phenomenal
prosperity that you all know; and now we have paid our debts to Europe;
we have returned the capital with which our country was built up; and in
the last half dozen years we have been accumulating an excess of capital
that is beginning to seek an outlet in foreign enterprises.

At the same time, there is seen in South America the dawn of a new life
which moves its people, as they have never been moved before, with the
spirit of industrial and commercial progress.

At a banquet that was given last winter to a great and distinguished
man, Lord Grey, Governor-General of Canada, he said: "The nineteenth
century was the century of the United States; the twentieth century will
be the century of Canada." I should feel surer as a prophet if I were to
say: "The twentieth century will be the century of South America." I
believe, with him, in the great development of Canada; but just as the
nineteenth century was the century of phenomenal development in North
America, I believe that no student can help seeing that the twentieth
century will be the century of phenomenal development in South America.

And so our countries will be face to face in a new attitude. We cannot
longer remain strangers to each other; our relations must be those of
intimacy, and this is the time to say that our relations will be those
of friendship.

On the other hand, before long the construction of the canal across the
Isthmus of Panama, which will fulfill the dreams of the early
navigators, which will accomplish the work projected for centuries, will
at last be completed, while the men who are today active in the business
of both countries are still on the field of action.

This, therefore, is the moment to safeguard harmony in the relations
between the two nations.

I do not believe that any one can say what changes the opening of the
Panama Canal will bring in the affairs of the world; but we do know that
great changes in the commercial routes of the world have changed the
course of history, and no one can doubt that the