e of public opinion, which enforces its decrees by an
appeal to the desire for approbation among men.

That progress is towards the independence, the freedom, the dignity, the
happiness of every small and weak nation. It tends to realize the
theory of international law, the real national equality. The process is
one of attrition. Isolation among nations leaves no appeal for the
enforcement of rules of right conduct, but the appeal to force.
Communication, intercourse, friendship, the desire for good opinion, the
exercise of all the qualities that adorn, that elevate, that refine
human nature, bring to the defense of the smaller nation the appeal to
the other sanction, the sanction of public opinion.

What we are doing now, because the time has come for it to be done, is
to help in our day and generation in the creation of a public opinion in
America which shall approve all that is good in national character and
national conduct and punish all that is wrong with that most terrible
penalty, the disapproval of all America. As that process approaches its
perfection, the work of our friends, of the armies and navies of
America, will have been accomplished.

It is not a work of selfishness; it is a work for universal
civilization. It is a work by which we will repay to France and Portugal
and to Sweden--to all our mother lands across the Atlantic--all the
gifts of civilization, of literature, of art, of the results of their
long struggles upward from barbarism to light, with which they have
endowed us. For in the vast fields of incalculable wealth that the
American continents offer to the enterprise and the cultivation of the
world, the older nations of Europe will find their wealth, and
opportunity for the exercise of their powers in peace and with equality.

It was a great pleasure to me--it was a cause of pride to me--to hear so
distinguished an English scholar as the Ambassador from France speak the
beautiful language of France so perfectly tonight. It is a great
pleasure for me to find that throughout the United States the young men
are in constantly increasing numbers learning to speak not only French,
but Spanish and Portuguese. It was a great pleasure to find throughout
South America last summer so many, not merely of the most distinguished
and highly cultivated men, speaking English, but so large a number of
the people in the cities that I visited.

It all makes for that attrition, that practical intercourse, whi