For forty years the Argentine Republic has lived and governed itself under a constitution in all material respects the exact counterpart of the Constitution of the United States. Its constitution was avowedly modelled after ours. For forty years, in fourteen separate states like our own, the people of Argentina have preserved the sacred right of local self-government. For forty years they have maintained at the same time the sovereignty of their nation; and by the constancy of their past they have given a high and ever-increasing credit to their promise that for the future, under Southern Cross as under Northern Star, government by the people, of the people, and for the people, shall endure. Under this constitutional system they have framed for themselves wise and liberal laws. They have constructed extensive works of internal improvement; and waterways, and railroads, and telegraph lines, all invite to the development of their vast natural wealth. They have established universal religious toleration. They have protected the rights of private property and of personal liberty. They have created and maintained a great system of public education. In more than three thousand public common schools over a quarter of a million children are today learning how to be good citizens. Grading up from these common schools through lyceums in every state and two great universities, the pathway of higher education is open to all the people of the republic. Under such a constitution and such laws, Argentina has made greater material progress and greater advance in the art of self-government, during our generation, than any people upon the western hemisphere, unless it be, perhaps, our own. We remember, too, that the people of Argentina, like our own fathers, won their liberty by struggle and by sacrifice. They made their fight for independence at a time when Europe was exhausted by the Napoleonic wars. They attracted but little attention and less aid from the Old World. No Byron enshrined their heroism in deathless verse; no Rousseau with the philosophy of humanity awoke for them generous and effective enthusiasm in the breasts of a Lafayette or a Rochambeau, a Von Steuben or a Kosciusko. Alone and unaided they fought their fight. Dependent upon themselves, on the ninth of July, seventy-seven years ago, they made their own declaration of independence, commemorated in the name of that thing of beauty and of power which today floats upon the bosom of the Hudson, a peer among the embattled navies of the world. They made good that declaration against all odds, through hardship, through suffering, through seas of blood, with desperate valor and lofty heroism, worthy the plaudits of the world. And then they conquered themselves; learned the hard lesson of subordinating personal ambition to law, to order, to the public weal.