long to the assembly of jurisconsults who are the glory and
pride of the American continent.

Still fresh in men's minds are the honors you reaped in Yale University
with the course of lectures you delivered on the part to be taken by
citizens in the government. Your lessons have taught what are the rights
to be exercised by citizens in nations ruled by democratic institutions
and what their duties in order that governments should be the true
representatives of the people's will.

But again, the academy deems it but just to accord all honor to the
great orator whose voice all America has been heeding with universal
approval for more than a year; heeding, because that voice has ever been
the expression of the lofty ideals which America has been pursuing from
the earliest days of her freedom and independence.

Nor is your eloquence the fruit of meditation and study; it savors not,
like that of Demosthenes, of the midnight oil. It is fresh and
spontaneous, such as ought to be at the command of men ever ready to
speak to the people of their rights and duties in democracies. It
abounds always in that cold reasoning and that inflexible logic which
alone can persuade and convince.

But your eloquence contains, besides, all the warmth, all the majesty,
and all the sparkle of the Latin eloquence.

Plutarch relates, in his life of Cicero, that when the great orator
thrilled the inhabitants of Rhodes with his speeches, Apollonius Molon,
after listening to him one day, showed no sign of admiration, but that
when Cicero had finished he said: "Cicero, I, no less than the others,
praise and admire thee; but I weep for the fate of Greece, for thou hast
taken to Rome the best that was left to Greece--wisdom and eloquence."

We in Latin America, less selfish than Apollonius Molon, do not weep;
rather do we cheer and reward the orator from whose lips we have heard
resound the accents of the Latin eloquence.

The Mexican Academy of Legislation and Jurisprudence, on presenting you
today with the diploma which confers upon you the degree of honorary
member, has desired to make known to the whole country your undoubted
merits as lawyer, jurisconsult, and orator, and on this solemn occasion
to bestow upon you its highest possible distinction.

Welcome to our midst. May your visit to Mexico be fruitful in good
results to both countries; may it be, above all, one more tie to bind
the sincere and unshaken friendship which unites them both