k out our own
salvation along our own lines; and if we are wise we will
make it understood as a cardinal feature of our joint
foreign policy that, on the one hand, we will not submit to
territorial aggrandizement on this continent by any Old
World power, and that, on the other hand, among ourselves
each nation must scrupulously regard the rights and
interests of the others, so that, instead of any one of us
committing the criminal folly of trying to rise at the
expense of our neighbors, we shall all strive upward in
honest and manly brotherhood, shoulder to shoulder.

And you, honored sir, have not been less explicit. Your words,
pronounced on a memorable occasion during your recent visit to South
America, before all the free peoples of this continent gathered together
at the third Pan American Conference, should be disclosed, should reach
the ears of my fellow-citizens, for these very words of yours, as
President Roosevelt solemnly declared in his last message to the
Congress of the United States, have revealed to all who doubted the
spirit of complete equality which inspired the Monroe Doctrine, what is
the attitude of the United States towards the other American republics,
and what its purposes. You declared then:

We wish for no victories but those of peace; for no
territory except our own; for no sovereignty except the
sovereignty over ourselves. We deem the independence and
equal rights of the smallest and weakest member of the
family of nations entitled to as much respect as those of
the greatest empire; and we deem the observance of that
respect the chief guaranty of the weak against the
oppression of the strong. We neither claim nor desire any
rights or privileges or powers that we do not freely concede
to every American republic. We wish to increase our
prosperity, to expand our trade, to grow in wealth, in
wisdom, and in spirit; but our conception of the true way to
accomplish this is not to pull down others and profit by
their ruin, but to help all friends to a common prosperity
and a common growth, that we may all become greater and
stronger together.

You spoke words of truth, and know, honored sir, that those are also our
aspirations, those our aims; and thither we wend our way, with the
constant steadiness which the Mexican people showed in its s