That he has chosen the United States for his permanent home
sufficiently indicates a predilection early evidenced in his book upon
this country; but that preference is neither blind nor unreasoned, any
more than his Pan-Americanism is the hollow proclamation that deceives
nobody less than alert South Americans. In his attitude to our nation
he is candid, direct, with the reserve of a Martí, a Rodó, a Verissimo,
only that he knows us more intimately than did those sterling spirits.
At the end of a series of lectures dedicated to the then President of
Leland Stanford Junior University, John Casper Branner, “distinguished
scientist, eminent scholar and true friend of Brazil,” and delivered
at that university, as well as others of this country, Lima declared
that “The filiation and evolution of Portuguese America are separate
from those of Spanish America; not infrequently, nay frequently
rather, was this evolution hostile to that of Spanish America; but
today they have common, identical interests, and a desire for a closer
approximation appears so reciprocal that this movement becomes every
day more pronounced and more firmly rooted. For Pan-Americanism to be
complete, it would be necessary for the United States to ally itself
with Latin America, with the importance, the influence, the prestige,
the superiority to which its civilization entitles it--it would not be
human to do otherwise--but without any thought, expressed or reserved,
of direct predominance, which offends the weaker element and renders it
suspicious.
“It is this which those who, like myself, know and esteem the United
States,--and the best way of showing one’s esteem is not by praising
unreservedly,--are hoping will come as the result of the great
university movement which is gradually crystallizing in this country.
Here idealism is a feature of the race (nor would you without it
belong to a superior race), an ideal so noble and elevated as that of
respect for the right of others, as that of human solidarity through
the unification of culture. The great statesman who now presides over
the destinies of the Argentine Republic, proclaimed at the First
Pan-American Conference, at Washington, that America belonged to all
humanity, not to a fraction of it; and indeed America is and will
continue to be more and more the field for the employment of European
capital, of study for European scholars, of commerce for European
merchants, of activity for European immigration. Only thus will the
New World fulfil its historical and social mission and redeem the debt
contracted with Europe, which has given it its civilization.”[2]
This is an example of that “Spirit of peace and concord to which I have
ever subordinated my spiritual activity.”[3]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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