Sir Henry Wotton is credited with the statement that "an ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to lie for the commonwealth", a definition half in jest but not without a touch of seriousness. The feeling is making itself manifest which will soon become universal, that an ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to represent the people of his own country to the people of the country to which he is accredited. Mr. Root, not sent to South America, but going on his own initiative, was an ambassador in this modern sense of the word to the Latin American states in 1906; and upon his return he enlarged the meaning of the function of an ambassador by representing to his countrymen the peoples whom he had visited in South America. The three addresses delivered before the Trans-Mississippi Commercial Congress, the National Convention for the Extension of Foreign Commerce of the United States, and the Pan American Commercial Conference are conceived in this spirit and were delivered in the performance of a continuous mission. A little less than three centuries of colonial and national life have brought the people inhabiting the United States, by a process of evolution, natural and, with the existing forces inevitable, to a point of distinct and radical change in their economic relations to the rest of mankind. During the period now past, the energy of our people, directed by the formative power created in our early population by heredity, by environment, by the struggle for existence, by individual independence, and by free institutions, has been devoted to the internal development of our own country. The surplus wealth produced by our labors has been applied immediately to reproduction in our own land. We have been cutting down forests and breaking virgin soil and fencing prairies and opening mines of coal and iron and copper and silver and gold, and building roads and canals and railroads and telegraph lines and cars and locomotives and mills and furnaces and schoolhouses and colleges and libraries and hospitals and asylums and public buildings and storehouses and shops and homes. We have been drawing on the resources of the world in capital and in labor to aid us in our work. We have gathered strength from every rich and powerful nation and expended it upon these home undertakings; into them we have poured hundreds of millions of money attracted from the investors of Europe. We have been always a debtor nation, borrowing from the rest of the world, drawing all possible energy towards us and concentrating it with our own energy upon our own enterprises. The engrossing pursuit of our own opportunities has excluded from our consideration and interest the enterprises and the possibilities of the outside world. Invention, discovery, the progress of science, capacity for organization, the enormous increase in the