ry Wotton is credited with the statement that "an
ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to lie for the
commonwealth", a definition half in jest but not without a
touch of seriousness. The feeling is making itself manifest
which will soon become universal, that an ambassador is an
honest man sent abroad to represent the people of his own
country to the people of the country to which he is
accredited. Mr. Root, not sent to South America, but going
on his own initiative, was an ambassador in this modern
sense of the word to the Latin American states in 1906; and
upon his return he enlarged the meaning of the function of
an ambassador by representing to his countrymen the peoples
whom he had visited in South America. The three addresses
delivered before the Trans-Mississippi Commercial Congress,
the National Convention for the Extension of Foreign
Commerce of the United States, and the Pan American
Commercial Conference are conceived in this spirit and were
delivered in the performance of a continuous mission.

A little less than three centuries of colonial and national life have
brought the people inhabiting the United States, by a process of
evolution, natural and, with the existing forces inevitable, to a point
of distinct and radical change in their economic relations to the rest
of mankind.

During the period now past, the energy of our people, directed by the
formative power created in our early population by heredity, by
environment, by the struggle for existence, by individual independence,
and by free institutions, has been devoted to the internal development
of our own country. The surplus wealth produced by our labors has been
applied immediately to reproduction in our own land. We have been
cutting down forests and breaking virgin soil and fencing prairies and
opening mines of coal and iron and copper and silver and gold, and
building roads and canals and railroads and telegraph lines and cars
and locomotives and mills and furnaces and schoolhouses and colleges and
libraries and hospitals and asylums and public buildings and storehouses
and shops and homes. We have been drawing on the resources of the world
in capital and in labor to aid us in our work. We have gathered strength
from every rich and powerful nation and expended it upon these home
undertakings; into them we have poured hundreds of millions of