roposing in behalf of
President Roosevelt the health and long life and prosperity of the
President of Peru.

BANQUET OF THE MINISTER FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS

SPEECH OF HIS EXCELLENCY JAVIER PRADO Y UGARTECHE

MINISTER FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS

At the Union Club, September 11, 1906

With the liveliest feelings of consideration and sympathy I have the
honor to offer this manifestation to His Excellency Mr. Elihu Root,
Secretary of State of the United States of America.

Yielding to the generous impulses of your American heart, and of your
brain of a thinker and of a statesman, you have felt a desire, Mr. Root,
to visit these countries, to address to them words of friendship and of
interest in their welfare, in the name of the honorable government which
you represent, and to shed over this continent the rays of the noble
ideal of American fraternity.

Your visit will undoubtedly produce fruitful results on behalf of
liberty and of justice, of peace and of progress, of order and of
improvement, which you have proclaimed as being the highest principles
inspiring the policy of the United States in the special mission for
which their peculiar virtues and energy have marked them out in the
destiny of humanity.

When those austere founders of American independence laid the
foundations of the great republic of the North, and gave it its
constitution, they were not inspired by narrow-minded ideas or by
selfish and transitory interest, but by a profound conviction of the
rights of man and a deep feeling of liberty and of justice, which, in
its irresistible consequences, would bring about the social and
political transformation which came to pass in the world at the end of
the eighteenth century, and was destined to constitute the gospel of
liberty and of democracy in our modern regime.

This same people, although still in its youth, did not hesitate, shortly
after, all alone, to guarantee the independence of all the American
countries, placing before the great powers of the world the pillars of
Hercules of the Monroe Doctrine, forming an impassable gateway to a free
and unconquerable America.

Today this same people excites the admiration of the whole world by its
grandeur. Its government brings to its level the harmony of humanity;
reestablishes, on the one hand, peace between the empires of Europe and
of Asia, and, on the other, between the republics of Central America;
patronizes the congress of The Hague, and in it obtain