tion, to see that all the expedients
of government, all the theories that are suggested, are submitted to the
test of practical experience and sound reason.

And so, with the deepest interest in the continued success of the
Brazilian experiment in self-government, I am most deeply impressed with
the honor you have done me. The encomiums which have been passed here
upon my country are such that to know of them must in itself be an
incentive to deserve them. I hope that every word which has been spoken
here about that dear republic from which I come, may go to the knowledge
of every citizen of the United States of America, and may lead him to
feel that it is his duty to see that this good opinion of our sister
republic is justified.

Senator Ruy Barbosa has justly interpreted the meaning of my visit. I
come not merely as the messenger of friendship; I come as that, but not
merely as that. When democratic institutions first found their place in
the protests of the New World against a colonial government that bound
us all hand and foot; when the plain people undertook to govern
themselves without any Heaven-sent superior force to control them, how
gloomy were the prognostications, how unfriendly were the wishes, how
uncomplimentary were the expressions which, upon the other side of the
Atlantic, greeted the new experiment--that we should have rule by the
mob, that disorder and anarchy would ensue, that plain men were
incapable and always would be incapable, of maintaining an orderly and
peaceful government. Lo, how the scene has changed! The conception of
man's capacity to govern himself, gaining year by year credit, belief,
demonstration, in the new fields of virgin lands, north and south, has
been carried back across the Atlantic until the old idea of a necessary
sovereign is shaken to the base. No longer is it man's conception of
government that it must be by a superior force, pressing down what is
bad; but that the pressure shall be from beneath, with all the good
impulses and capacities of human nature pressing upward what is good. I
come here not only to hold out the right hand of friendship to you from
my country, but also to assert in the most positive, the most salient
way the solidarity of republican institutions in the New World, the
similarity of results, the mutual confidence that is felt by my country
in yours, and by yours in mine; to assert before all the world that the
great experiment of free self-governm