s it was true then.
There has been no departure from the standard of feeling and of policy
which was declared then in behalf of the American people. On the
contrary, there is throughout the people of this country a fuller
realization of the duty and the morality and the high policy of that
standard.

Of course, in every country there are individuals who depart from the
general opinion and general conviction, both in their views and in their
conduct; but the great, the overwhelming body of the American people
love liberty, not in the restricted sense of desiring it for themselves
alone, but in the broader sense of desiring it for all mankind. The
great body of the people of these United States love justice, not merely
as they demand it for themselves, but in being willing to render it to
others. We believe in the independence and the dignity of nations, and
while we are great, we estimate our greatness as one of the least of our
possessions, and we hold the smallest state, be it upon an island of the
Caribbean or anywhere in Central or South America, as our equal in
dignity, in the right to respect and in the right to the treatment of an
equal. We believe that nobility of spirit, that high ideals, that
capacity for sacrifice are nobler than material wealth. We know that
these can be found in the little state as well as in the big one. In our
respect for you who are small, and for you who are great, there can be
no element of condescension or patronage, for that would do violence to
our own conception of the dignity of independent sovereignty. We desire
no benefits which are not the benefits rendered by honorable equals to
each other. We seek no control that we are unwilling to concede to
others, and so long as the spirit of American freedom shall continue, it
will range us side by side with you, great and small, in the maintenance
of the rights of nations, the rights which exist as against us and as
against all the rest of the world.

With that spirit we hail your presence here to cooperate with those of
us who are interested in the international law; we hail the formation of
the new American Institute of International Law and the personal
friendships that are being formed day by day between the men of the
North and the men of the South, all to the end that we may unite in such
clear and definite declaration of the principles of right conduct among
nations, and in such steadfast and honorable support of those principles