ish harmony of ideals and close similarity of
destiny.

So it is happening and so should it be. Offsprings of the same
continent, your institutions point out the path for the development of
ours, your mental and moral advance fires the vigor of our spirit, your
tireless activity excites us to action; in a word, your progress uplifts
our noblest ambitions. We are both marching on to the victories of
civilization, although your lot, in the course of history, shall have
been that of forerunners.

One of your scholars has said that the American nation has rendered five
eminent services to the world's civilization. True are his words. For
the American nation has, in the first place, sustained by word and by
deed, the principle that the medium of bringing differences between
nations to an end, is arbitration; it has accepted and practised
religious toleration as has no other nation; it has known how to raise
the dignity of man, by giving to the political vote the development
which a true democracy calls for; it has thrown open its doors to all
such as seek progress and liberty in your country, and it has taken them
in to form part of one and the same great soul; and lastly, it has
known, as no other nation has, how to scatter abroad material benefits,
the very basis of the moral and mental perfection of the individual. To
these factors and to others derived from the conditions of its
privileged soil, is due the great importance of the American people as a
powerful force in the progress of humanity.

I shall not attempt to analyze in their essence these five glorious
victories of civilization. My mind is dazed by the victory of democracy
through the true action of the suffrage. This is the germ, the primary
origin of your greatness as a people, which makes you the beacon for the
eager gaze of all those who, down-trodden by power or by poverty, seek
under the shelter of your wise laws, the guarantee of life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness, to quote the sacred formula of your
Declaration of Independence; this it is which explains why neither the
difference of race and language, nor the morbid influence produced in
the mind by secular despotism, nor the infinite diversity of religion,
is an obstacle to the hundreds of thousands of helpless beings whom year
by year the Old World is casting on your shores, to be transformed into
citizens and become identified with the new fatherland, as if the
national spirit had breathed