her duties to perform but to make the stranger
who came from the distant republic of the north at home and happy, and
he did it as the men of his country know how to do it. Even then he held
a great place in the government of his country; and it is a matter of
the utmost satisfaction to me that his people have continued their
confidence in him and have led him along step by step to higher and
higher office, so that today he stands in the forefront of the statesmen
who are making Brazil one of the great world powers of our modern
civilization.

It is not, my friends, a mere gathering of courtesy tonight. We are not
merely performing a duty of hospitality to the representative of a
foreign state, when we exhibit our sincere friendship and our kindly
feelings toward Dr. Mueller and his country; we are doing for ourselves
something of inestimable value, and we are doing something of
inestimable value for the people of our country.

Of late the electors of America, the unofficial people of America, are
demanding, asserting and laying hold upon more and more direct relation
to the powers of government; but a democracy when it undertakes to
govern directly, needs to remember that there are no rights without a
duty, there is no duty without a right; and if a democracy is to govern
itself well it must realize its responsibilities. We have been so
isolated, we have been so free from wars and rumors of wars, so little
inconvenienced by interference on the part of other nations in our vast
domain, so busy with our internal affairs, that the people of the United
States know but little, think but little, and care but little regarding
foreign affairs. If the people of the United States are themselves to
direct their foreign affairs they must come to a realizing sense of
their responsibilities in foreign affairs; and first among those
responsibilities is the duty of courtesy, the duty of kindly
consideration, the duty to subordinate selfish interests to the broader
interests of the nations of the world; the duty to treat every other
nation with that judicial sense of others' rights which differentiates
all diplomacy from the controversies of courts or the clashing of
business interests.

Our people, if their voice is to be heard in foreign affairs, must learn
that we cannot continue a policy of peace with insult; we must learn
civility, we must learn that when we speak, when an American sovereign
speaks of the affairs of other natio