and the rewards of enterprise
secure, the production of wealth and the increase of purchasing power
will afford a market for the commerce of the world worthy to rank even
with the markets of the Orient, as the goal of business enterprise. The
material resources of South America are in some important respects
complementary to our own; that continent is weakest where North America
is strongest as a field for manufactures; it has comparatively little
coal and iron. In many respects the people of the two continents are
complementary to each other; the South American is polite, refined,
cultivated, fond of literature and of expression and of the graces and
charms of life, while the North American is strenuous, intense,
utilitarian. Where we accumulate, they spend. While we have less of the
cheerful philosophy which finds sources of happiness in the existing
conditions of life, they have less of the inventive faculty which
strives continually to increase the productive power of man and lower
the cost of manufacture. The chief merits of the peoples of the two
continents are different; their chief defects are different. Mutual
intercourse and knowledge cannot fail greatly to benefit both. Each can
learn from the other; each can teach much to the other, and each can
contribute greatly to the development and prosperity of the other. A
large part of their products find no domestic competition here; a large
part of our products will find no domestic competition there. The
typical conditions exist for that kind of trade which is profitable,
honorable, and beneficial to both parties.

The relations between the United States and South America have been
chiefly political rather than commercial or personal. In the early days
of the South American struggle for independence, the eloquence of Henry
Clay awakened in the American people a generous sympathy for the
patriots of the south as for brethren struggling in the common cause of
liberty. The clear-eyed, judicious diplomacy of Richard Rush, the
American minister at the Court of St. James, effected a complete
understanding with Great Britain for concurrent action in opposition to
the designs of the Holy Alliance, already contemplating the partition of
the southern continent among the great powers of continental Europe. The
famous declaration of Monroe arrayed the organized and rapidly
increasing power of the United States as an obstacle to European
interference and made it forever plain