I congratulate you, sir, and your associates, upon being citizens of a country and of a state--both you of Rio de Janeiro and you Paulistas,--where the rewards of enterprise and activity are secure, and where there is open to every youth the pathway of success by deserving success. May this prize be an incentive to you and your comrades to exercise every manly effort, both for yourselves and for your country. SANTOS SPEECH OF DOCTOR REZENDE At the Commercial Association of Santos, August 7, 1906 On behalf of the Board of Directors of the Commercial Association of Santos, I bid you welcome. The men gathered in this hall to greet you are cosmopolitan in character--Americans, Europeans, and Brazilians--men who have united their best efforts in the great movement of distributing coffee throughout the whole world. Coffee is our staple product, and for many years to come is bound to be the backbone of our financial system. The value of this great product is, however, much greater than is shown by the simple figures of statistics. In order to understand its true value, we must add to it the other articles which are produced with it, and which are unknown to the commercial world. Coffee also means corn, beans, rice, cattle, etc., which are abundantly raised by our coffee planters; coffee means also all of our infant industries, and those prosperous towns which dot the romantic shores of the Tieté, Paranahyba, and the Mogy-Guasú. For us, sir, coffee means plenty, prosperity, and perhaps greatness. It is therefore easy to see how deeply we are interested in the growth of American commerce and civilization. The American people need for their trade nearly eleven million bags of coffee per annum, or almost all of an average crop of the state of São Paulo. It is not necessary to lay special stress on this main fact, production and consumption; one is the complement of the other, and the development of both our activities and interests are so identified that we cannot talk of coffee without thinking of its greatest consumer, the American people. Seventeen years ago, in 1889, James G. Blaine, one of your most distinguished statesmen, called together the first Pan American Congress in Washington. It is a long time for us business men to wait. We feel, however, that the ideals of that great statesman have not yet been realized. The great distance which separates us is perhaps somewhat responsible for the want of closer relations between our peoples; and when your visit to our shores was first announced, we Brazilians all felt that your presence in Brazil meant a new departure in American-Brazilian relations.