Among the astonishing. changes that have come upon the political face of the world within a few years past, producing new arrangements of rank or standing and new distributions of influence in the great family of nations, the emergence of the South American republics from generally chronic disorder and obscure unimportance to a position, almost suddenly recognized, of present weight and dignity and great promise to the future, is far from the least. In 1890, when Mr. Blaine, as Secretary of State, opened the first well-planned endeavor of our government to put itself into such relations with them, of friendly influence, as the elder and stronger in the family of American republics ought to hold, there was little appreciation of the importance of the movement. Even Mr. Blaine did not seem to be fully earnest and fully sanguine in it, or else his chief and his colleagues in the government were not heartily with him; for his admirable scheme of policy was almost wrecked in the second year of its working, by the unaccountable impatience and harshness with which President Harrison wrung humiliating apologies from Chili for a trifling offense in 1892. The seeming arrogance of power then manifested cast a reasonable suspicion on the motives with which the great republic of North America had made overtures of fraternity to the republics of the South, and it freshened an old distrust in their minds. {20} Happily, however, Mr. Blaine, in 1890, had brought about the creation of a harmonizing and unifying agency which needed only time to effect great results. This was the Bureau of the American Republics, established at Washington, by a vote of the delegates from eighteen North, South, and Central American governments, at an International American Conference, held in that city in March of the year named. Its immediate purpose was the promotion of commercial intercourse; but the information spread with that object, through all the countries concerned, has carried with it every kind of pacific understanding and stimulation. The common action with common interests thus organized must have had more than anything else to do with the generating of a public spirit, lately, in the Spanish-American countries, very different from any ever manifested before. It has wakened national ambitions in them and sobered the factious temper which kept them in political disorder so long.