it has produced
an impression of the stability of our institutions and of our public
strength sufficient to dissipate the fears of our friends or the hopes
of those who wish us ill.

Thus there exists in the Spanish American Republics confidence toward
the United States. On our side they find a feeling of cordial amity and
friendship, and a desire to cultivate and develop our common interests
on this continent. With some of these States our relations are more
intimate than with others, either by reason of closer similarity of
constitutional forms, of greater commercial intercourse, of proximity in
fact, or of the construction or contemplated construction of lines of
transit for our trade and commerce between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
With several of them we have peculiar treaty relations. The treaty of
1846 between the United States and New Granada contains stipulations
of guaranty for the neutrality of that part of the Isthmus within the
present territory of Colombia, and for the protection of the rights
of sovereignty and property therein belonging to Colombia. Similar
stipulations appear in the treaty of 1867 with Nicaragua, and of July,
1864, with Honduras. Those treaties (like the treaty of alliance made
with France in 1778 by Dr. Franklin, Silas Deane, and Arthur Lee)
constitute _pro tanto_ a true protective alliance between the United
States and each of those Republics. Provisions of like effect appear
in the treaty of April 19, 1850, between Great Britain and the United
States.

Brazil, with her imperial semblance and constitutional reality, has
always held relations of amity with us, which have been fortified by
the opening of her great rivers to commerce. It needs only that, in
emulation of Russia and the United States, she should emancipate her
slaves to place her in more complete sympathy with the rest of America.

It will not be presumptuous, after the foregoing sketch, to say, with
entire consideration for the sovereignty and national pride of the
Spanish American Republics, that the United States, by the priority
of their independence, by the stability of their institutions, by the
regard of their people for the forms of law, by their resources as a
government, by their naval power, by their commercial enterprise, by the
attractions which they offer to European immigration, by the prodigious
internal development of their resources and wealth, and by the
intellectual life of their population, occup