at Republic of the
North feel toward the twenty million souls of the Republic of Brazil.

It is not, then, a diplomatic representation; it is not an embassy. It
is the Government of the United States itself in person, in one of its
predominant organs--an organ so exalted that it holds almost as high a
position there in the national sentiment as the Presidency itself. For
the first time is the North American Union visiting another part of the
continent--Latin America. And this direct, personal and most solemn
visit of one America to the other has now as its scene the Brazilian
Senate, assuming, within the brief dimensions of this chamber, the
magnificent proportions of a picture for which our nation constitutes
the frame and the attentive circle of the nations the gallery.

For the modest importance of our nation, the event is of incomparable
significance. None other can be likened to it in the history of our
existence as a republic. After sixteen years of embarrassments, perils,
and conflicts, the latter appears to be receiving its final consecration
in this solemnity. It is the grand recognition of our democracy, the
proclamation of the attainment of our majority as a republic. The
stability of the government, its prestige, its honor and its vigor,
could not have received a greater attestation before the world. Replying
to the doubts, the negations, and the affronts with which our '89 was
received, amidst passions at home and prejudices abroad, it signifies
the irrevocable triumph of our revolution, closes forever the era of
monarchical reassertions and opens up our future to order, confidence,
and labor.

Almost all of us who compose this assembly, Mr. President, belong to
that generation who were opening their eyes to public life, or were
preparing for it by their higher studies, when the struggle was going on
in the United States between slavery and freedom--that campaign of
Titans which tore the entrails of America and shook the globe for many
years.

Washington, Jefferson, and Madison had died, despairing of the
extinction of slavery. This being openly proclaimed as the corner stone
of the Confederacy, which gloried in having as its basis and in holding
as a supreme truth the subjection by Providence of one race to the
other, it looked as if the work of the patriarchs of 1787 was doomed to
inevitable destruction against the black rock, thus consummating the
Jeffersonian prophecy.

But Christian order prevail