Reply of Mr. Knox.
Mr. President, Ladies, and Gentlemen:
It is an honor and a sincere pleasure to be your guest and the recipient of the cordial welcome of Panama. It is a privilege to stand upon the threshold of the consummation of the greatest work done by man in or for the world and to feel that one is not a stranger upon the soil dedicated from the creation to be the scene of the supreme effort for human advancement when man’s requirements demanded it and man’s genius should be equal to the task.
When the necessities of the world’s first civilization could be no longer supplied and its aspirations no longer satisfied in its oriental abode it was natural that the pioneers of those days should make their first explorations by following the path of the life-giving sun in its daily journeys toward the West.
The fruits of their first timid ventures emboldened them to more ambitious endeavor, and the ever-increasing rewards resulting from the discovery of continents and seas beckoned them on until, halted here by another world, they seemed to have fulfilled their mission of companion discoverers with the sun, which passed on in solitude toward and into the unknown.
It was not until 1513, when Balboa stood “silent upon a peak in Darien” and gazed upon the waters of the Pacific, that it was evident that the hand that gave the seas and formed the land left it possible to divide the hemisphere which halted western progress, even as Moses had divided the Red Sea that the children of Israel might pass, and though the hand of the early navigators were unskilled for the gigantic task their imaginations grasped the possibility of its successful realization.
The history of the project to build an isthmian canal is full of strange national and personal disappointments. Perhaps the most tragic of them all is that, coincident with Spain’s loss of the last vestige of her sovereignty in the New World, the final act of the realization of the dreams of her great navigators began.
After many vicissitudes and failures the completion of this stupendous work devolved upon the people of the United States, who are thus thrown into relations with the countries of the isthmian region which, with our geographical propinquity, make a broader understanding and a more sympathetic reciprocal interest between us an essential basis for the realization of the splendid possibilities which seem to have been decreed from the beginning of time.
The President of the United States believes that the early completion of the Panama Canal should mark the beginning of closer relations to all Latin America, and especially to the Caribbean littoral, as well as the relations of these countries to each other, and, impelled by the thought that this is an auspicious moment, through better acquaintance, to lay the foundations upon which there should rest a broader confidence, a closer sympathy, and more practical reciprocal helpfulness, has sent me hither as a bearer of a message of good will to our sister American republics. It is the President’s desire that I might personally meet your most hospitable peoples, might see for myself your beautiful countries, with their boundless resources and economic possibilities, to the end that such direct personal [Page 1246] knowledge, understanding, and appreciation might result in mutual advantage and in cooperation for the development of all our countries. Responding to the hospitality of the country which has first and so generously received me and with which the relations of my country are so cordially intimate, I take this opportunity of assuring all the American republics that the purpose of the United States toward them is that we should live in amity and essential harmony and that Ave desire only that more peace, more prosperity, more happiness, and more security should come in and become a part of their individual and national lives.
While it is entirety clear to those who have fairly and intelligently considered the history of the relations of the United States to the other American republics that our politics have been without a trace of sinister motive or design, craving neither sovereignty nor territory, yet it is true that our motives toward you have not always been fortunately interpreted either at home or faithfully represented by some of our nationals who have resided in your midst.
While we have much to learn of each other and are all to be vastly profited by clear and more sympathetic ties, yet between the elder and the younger republics there is much in common.
A commonwealth founded on freedom of conscience and security of individual rights is not an exclusive heritage of Saxon America, but one shared by all the peoples of the hemisphere who, like ourselves, have passed through the sore trials that attend the founding of new communities in a new land. However diverse our physical environments, However great the contrast between the natural obstacles to be surmounted, whether amid the snows and pine forests of the north or in the sierras of the equator and the pampas of the south, the aim of our respective enterprises, expressed in the undying words of Lincoln, has been the same, to bring forth on this continent new nations, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Much has been said about the effect of the opening of the Panama Canal, but I believe it is given to few of us to realize what magic possibilities are potential in that event. As I conceive it, it will create for our western world an entirely new situation, a situation fraught with possibilities so vast they daze the fancy of the mind. In this new world Ave must be found drawn closer by sympathies and mutual esteem, and working in harmony toward beneficent ends. This must be so, for our greatest interests are those that are common to us all. We who live on the western hemisphere find ourselves by force of geography in circumstances which make our situation peculiar, and this fundamental fact gives us privileges and imposes upon us duties and obligations we would not otherwise have. It was a perception of this, which your own thinkers and statesmen have seen as clearly as our won which prompted the announcement by President Monroe of the great and beneficent policy that now bears his name. When the canal is opened and the ships of all the countries of the world come sailing through these Carib seas, the peculiarity of our position with its special requirement will be accentuated and the wisdom of that doctrine confirmed again and specially. It serves admittedly your interests as much as ours. Even now it is a great bond between us. In its future amplification I perceive it will be a common heritage [Page 1247] binding together the nations of this hemisphere with a force no power can break, and while it has in Providence been given to us of the north to state and interpret it, it has never been invoked to the detriment of the people of the south or operated to their hurt.
In my judgment the Monroe Doctrine will reach the acme of its beneficence when it is regarded by the people of the United States as a reason why we should constantly respond to the needs of those of our Latin-American neighbors who may find necessity for our assistance in their progress toward better government or who may seek our aid to meet their just obligations and thereby to maintain honorable relations to the family of nations. Great as will be the glory of having physically divided a hemisphere, a greater glory will be to have contributed to the unity, happiness, and prosperity of its people.
It is a paradox that the severance of the physical ligament that joins the two continents of the New World will more closely unite them. Culebra is the clot in the artery of intercourse whose removal will give free and full circulation throughout the whole organism to the vivifying currents of friendship, peace, commerce, and prosperity.
When the waters of the two oceans are blended on the soil of Panama it will make curious changes in the geography of the Americas. All that is south of the Isthmus will be nearer to all that is north, and all that is north will, in a peculiar sense, be more closely drawn together. The Central American republics will be the tropical end of a vast island whose northern limits will extend to the eternal ice and whose southern boundary will be a continuous procession of the commerce of the world.