One voice that should have spoken here today is silent, but many of us cannot forget or cease to mourn and to honor our dear and noble friend, Joaquim Nabuco. Ambassador from Brazil, dean of the American Diplomatic Corps, respected, admired, trusted, loved, and followed by all of us, he was a commanding figure in the international movement of which the erection of this building is a part. The breadth of his political philosophy, the nobility of his idealism, the prophetic vision of his poetic imagination, were joined to wisdom, to the practical sagacity of statesmanship, to a sympathetic knowledge of men, and to a heart as sensitive and tender as a woman's. He followed the design and construction of this building with the deepest interest. His beneficent influence impressed itself upon all of our actions. No benison can be pronounced upon this great institution so rich in promise for its future as the wish that his ennobling memory may endure and his civilizing spirit may control, in the councils of the International Union of American Republics. FOOTNOTES: [7] _Foreign Relations of the United States_, 1881, p. 14. [8] _The Pan American Union_, pp. 81, 82. [9] Ibid., p. 7. [10] The name was changed to the Pan American Union in 1910. [11] Later increased to $950,000. OUR SISTER REPUBLIC--ARGENTINA ADDRESS AT THE BANQUET OF THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK TO THE OFFICERS OF THE FOREIGN AND UNITED STATES SQUADRONS WHICH ESCORTED THE SPANISH CARAVELS TO NEW YORK, APRIL 28, 1893 It is my pleasant privilege to respond to a toast to an offspring of old Spain, a direct lineal descendant, an inheritor of her blood, her faith and her language. It is only a young republic, only an American republic. No historic centuries invest her with romance or with interest; but she is great in glorious promise of the future, and great in manifest power to fulfill the promise. Far away to the southward, beyond the great empire of the Amazon, beyond the equatorial heats, there stretches a vast land, from the latitude of Cuba on the north to the latitude of Hudson Bay on the south, and from the Andes to the Eastern Sea. In this land mighty rivers flow through vast forests, and immeasurable plains stretch from ocean to mountains, with a soil of inexhaustible fertility, under every variety of healthful and invigorating climate. All this we know; but we must not forget, and we cannot forget tonight, that this great land, capable of supporting in plenty all the teeming millions of Europe, is possessed by the people of a free constitutional republic, of all the sisterhood of nations, in form, in feature and in character, the most like to ourselves.