Latin America and the United States: Addresses by Elihu RootRoot, Elihu
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Latin America and the United States: Addresses by Elihu Root
Root, Elihu
America -- Foreign relations; Latin America -- Foreign relations -- United States; United States -- Foreign relations -- Latin America
Your welcome is very grateful to me; your kind expressions I most
heartily reciprocate. I do not wish to return evil for good by
preaching, but it occurs to me that you have--I will not say that you
have left your country for your country's good--you have not abandoned
your opportunities to serve her; you have rather reached the position
where you have new opportunities for service as American citizens. One
serious fault which formerly existed to a very great extent among
Americans, and which has been growing less, was a certain provincial and
narrow way of looking at foreigners. There was a good deal of truth
underlying the observations and characterizations of Mr. Dickens which
made our people so angry sixty or seventy years ago. One of our American
humorists refers to the people of a western mining camp as looking upon
a newcomer with the idea that he had the defective moral quality of
being a foreigner. Now the residuum of that old feeling stands in the
way of American trade and American intercourse generally with other
nations. No one can do more to hasten the disappearance of that attitude
than you who have experienced the friendship and kindliness of the
people of this foreign country; you who have learned by your personal
experience how many and how noble are the characteristics of this
foreign people; you who have been able to see how much we Americans may
well learn from them; you can, each one of you, be a teacher of your
countrymen in your continued intercourse with your homes and your home
associates in the gospel of courtesy and kindliness toward all mankind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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