Mr. Secretary of State, ladies and gentlemen, in the presence of deeds of this magnitude, inspired and filled with enthusiasm by them, let us pour out a libation to the United States of the North, to its vigorous President, to you and to your distinguished family, the herald of continental friendship, and to the American fatherland, from the Bering Straits to Cape Horn. REPLY OF MR. ROOT I thank you for the kind reference to myself, and I thank you for the high terms in which you have spoken of my country, from which I am so far away. Do not think, I beg you, sir, if I accept what you have said regarding the country I love, that we, in the north, consider ourselves so perfect as your description of us. We have virtues, we have good qualities, and we are proud of them; but we ourselves know in our own hearts how many faults we have. We know the mistakes we have made, the failures we have made, the tasks that are still before us to perform. Yet from the experiences of our efforts and our successes, and from the experiences of our faults and our failures, we, the oldest of the organized republics of America, say to you of Uruguay, and to all our sisters, "Be of good cheer and confident hope." You have said, Mr. President, in your eloquent remarks this evening, that the progress of Uruguay has been slow. Slow as measured by our lives, perhaps, but not slow as measured by the lives of nations. The march of civilization is slow; it moves little during single human lives. Through the centuries and the ages it proceeds with deliberate and certain step. Look to England, whence came the principles embodied in your constitution, and ours, where first were developed the principles of free representative government. Remember through how many generations England fought and bled in her wars of the White and the Red--her blancos and colorados--the white rose of York and the red rose of Lancaster, before she could win her way to the security of English law. Look to France, whence came the great declarations of the rights of man and remember--I in my own time can remember--the Tuileries standing in bright and peaceful beauty, and then in a pile of blackened ruins bearing the inscription, "Liberty, equality, and fraternity," doing injustice to liberty, to equality, and to fraternity. These nations have passed through their furnaces. Every nation has had its own hard experience in its progressive development, but a nation is certain to progress if its tendency is right. It is so with Uruguay. You are passing through the phases of steady development. The restless and untiring soul of José Artigas, who made the independence of Uruguay possible, did its work in its time, but its time is past; it is not the day of Artigas now.