I thank you for your kindly expressions regarding my President, regarding myself, and regarding my country. In the "United States of America," as our Constitution called us many years ago--the "United States of North America," as perhaps we should call ourselves south of the equator--we have been for a long time, and are still trying to reconcile individual liberty with public order, local self-government with a strong central and national control; trying to develop the capacity of the individuals of our people to control themselves, and also the capacity of the people collectively for self-government; trying to adopt sound financial methods, to promote justice--a justice compatible with mercy--and to make progress in all that makes a people happier, more prosperous, better educated, better able to perform their duties as citizens and to do their part in the world to help humanity out of the hard conditions of poverty and ignorance and along the pathway of civilization. We have done what we could. We have committed errors and we acknowledge them and are deeply conscious of them; but we are justly proud of our country for the progress it has made; and we look on every country that is engaged in that same struggle for liberty and justice with profound sympathy and warm friendship. I am here to say to the Chilean people that although there have been misunderstandings in the past, they were misunderstandings such as arise between two vigorous, proud peoples that know each other too little. Let us know each other better and we shall have put an end to misunderstandings. The present moment is especially propitious for saying this, because we are upon the threshold of great events in this western world of ours. In my own country the progress of development has reached a point of transition. In the fifty years, from 1850 to 1900, we received on our shores nearly twenty million immigrants from the Old World. We borrowed from the Old World thousands of millions of dollars; and with the strong arm of the immigrants and with the capital from the Old World, we have threaded the country with railroads, we have constructed great public works, we have created the phenomenal prosperity that you all know; and now we have paid our debts to Europe; we have returned the capital with which our country was built up; and in the last half dozen years we have been accumulating an excess of capital that is beginning to seek an outlet in foreign enterprises. At the same time, there is seen in South America the dawn of a new life which moves its people, as they have never been moved before, with the spirit of industrial and commercial progress.