A much-commented passage of Cicero teaches how it is our duty sedulously to preserve our original character; that which differentiates and determines, so far as may wisely be, the primal natural impulses, as they derive from a various distribution of natural gifts and so make up the concert and the order of the world. And even more would this seem to be true as applied to human collectivities. But perhaps you will say that there is no seal, no peculiar and definite thing to mark the quality for whose permanence and integrity we should do battle in the actual organization of our people. Perhaps there lacks in our South American character the definite contour of a personality. But even so, we Latin-Americans have an inheritance of Race, a great ethnic tradition to maintain, a sacred bond which unites us to immortal pages of history and puts us on our honour to preserve this for the future. That cosmopolitanism which we have to respect as the irresistible tendency of our development need not exclude that sentiment of fidelity to the past, nor that moulding and directing force of which the genius of our race must avail itself in the fusing of the elements that shall constitute the American of the future.

It has more than once been pointed out that the great epochs of history, its most fertile periods, are always the result of distinct but coexisting forces which by their very agreement to oppose maintain the interest and stimulus of life, which in the quietism of a universal accord might tend to disappear. So the two extremes of Athens, and Sparta revolve on an axle around which circles the race of greatest genius man has known. So America needs at this time to maintain its original duality, which has converted from classic myth to actual history the story of the two eagles, loosed at the same moment from either pole, to arrive at the same moment at each one’s limit of dominion. This difference in genius does not exclude honourable emulation, nor discourage in very many relations agreement or even solidarity. And if one can dimly foresee even a higher concord in the future, that will be due not to a one-sided imitation of one race by the other, but to a reciprocity of influences and a skilful harmonizing of those attributes which make the peculiar glory of either race.

Still, the dispassionate study of that civilization which some would offer to us as a model, affords a reason no less potent than those which are based only on the indignity and unworthiness of mere imitation to temper the enthusiasm of those who propose it as our model.... And now I come to the very theme of my discourse, and the relation to it of this spirit of imitation. Any severe judgment formed upon our neighbours of the North should begin, like the courteous fencer, by lowering a rapier in salute to them. Easy is this for me. Failure to recognize their faults does not seem to me so insensate as to deny their qualities. Born — to employ Beaudelaire’s paradox — with the innate experience of liberty, they have kept themselves faithful to the law of their birth; and have developed, with the precision and certainty of a mathematical progression, the fundamental principles of their organization. This gives to their history a unity which, even if it has excluded the acquirement of different aptitudes or merits, has at least the intellectual beauty of being logical. The traces of its progress will never be expunged from the annals of human right, because they have been the first to evoke our modern ideal of liberty and to convert it from the uncertainty of experiment and the visions of Utopia into imperishable bronze and living reality. For they have shown by their example the possibility of extending the immovable authority of a republic over an immense national commonwealth, and, with their federal organization, have revealed — as de Tocqueville felicitously put it — the manner in which the brilliancy and power of great states may be combined with the felicity and peace of little ones....

Theirs are many of the most daring deeds for which the perspective of time shall distinguish this century; theirs is the glory of having revealed completely the greatness and dignity of labour, thereby accentuating the firmest note of moral beauty in all our civilization; that blest force which antiquity abandoned to the abjection of slavery, and which to-day we identify with the highest expression of human dignity, based on the consciousness and the exertion of its own merit. Strong, tenacious of purpose, holding inaction as opprobrious, they have placed in the hands of the mechanic of their shops and the farmer of their fields the mystic key of Hercules, and have given to human genius a new and unwonted beauty, girding it with the leathern apron of the handworker. Each one of these presses on to conquer life as his Puritan ancestors did the wilderness. Persistent followers of that creed of individual energy which makes of every man the artificer of his destiny, they have modelled their commonwealth on a kind of imaginary population of Crusoes, who, as soon as they have roughly attended to their training in the art of taking care of themselves, will turn to the making of themselves into a stable State. And, never sacrificing to this their conception of the sovereign Individual, they yet have known how at the same time to make of their association the most admirable instrument of their grandeur and empire; they have got from the sum of their energies, as devoted to research, industry, philanthropy, results that are the more marvellous in that they were secured with the most absolute integrity of their personal liberty.

They have a sleepless and insatiable instinct of curiosity, an impatient eagerness for the light; and, carrying a fondness for public education almost to the point of monomania, have made the common school the surest prop of their prosperity, believing that the mind of the child should be the most cherished of their precious things. Their culture, while far from being spiritual or refined, has an admirable efficiency so far as it is directed to practical ends and their immediate realization. And, while they have not added to the acquisitions of science a single general law, one new principle, they have done wonders in its application to new inventions and made giant strides in its service to utilities; in the steam boiler, the electric dynamo, are now billions of invisible slaves who centuple for their Aladdin the power of the magic lamp. The growth of their greatness and power will astonish future generations. By their marvellous gift for improvisation they have found a spur to time, so that in a few years they conjure, as it were from a desert, the fruitage hitherto the work of centuries.

And that Puritan liberty which gave them light in the past unites with that light a piety which still endures. Beside the factory and the school it has erected churches whence ascend the prayers of millions of free consciences. They have been able to save from the shipwreck of all the idealities that which is the highest of all, and kept alive the tradition of a religious sentiment which, if it does not uplift on wings of the highest idealism, spirituality, at least maintains over the utilitarian stampede some rein of the moral sense. Also, they have known how to maintain a certain primitive robustness even amidst the refinements of a highly civilized life; they hold to the pagan cult of health, sanity, and strength; they preserve in strong muscles the instrument of a strong will; obliged by their insatiable ambition to employ all human energies, they fit the torso of the athlete over the heart of the free man. And from all this springs a dominant note of optimism, confidence, faith, which makes them face the future with a proud and stubborn assurance; the note of “Excelsior” and the “Psalm of Life,” which their poets have opposed as a balsam to melancholy or bitterness of spirit.

Thus it is that their Titanic greatness impresses even those made most distrustful by their exaggerations of character and the recent violences of their history; and I, who do not love them, as you see, admire them still.