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foundly concerned with peace, because it can express itself best only in peace. It is the spirit of peace and good-will and of human freedom; but it is also the spirit of a nation that is self-conscious, that knows and loves its mission in the world, and that knows that it must command the respect of the world.

So it seems to me that we are not working as those who would change anything of America, but only as those who would safeguard everything in America. * * *

New York Times, Oct. 7, 1915.

YEAR 1916

30. WHAT IS PAN-AMERICANISM?

(January 6, 1916)

ADDRESS TO PAN-AMERICAN SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS AT

WASHINGTON

It was a matter of sincere regret with me that I was not in the city to extend the greetings of the Government to this distinguished body, and I am very happy that I have returned in time at least to extend to it my felicitations upon the unusual interest and success of its proceedings. I wish that it might have been my good fortune to be present at the sessions and be instructed by the papers that were read. I have somewhat become inured to scientific papers in the course of a long experience, but I have never ceased to be instructed and to enjoy them.

The sessions of this Congress have been looked forward to with the greatest interest throughout this country, because there is no more certain evidence of intellectual life than the desire of men of all nations to share their thoughts with one another.

I have been told so much about the proceedings of this Congress that I feel that I can congratulate you upon the increasing sense of comradeship and intimate intercourse which has marked its sessions from day to day; and it is a very happy circumstance in our view that this, perhaps the most vital and successful of the meetings of this Congress, should have occurred in the Capital of our own country, because we should wish to regard this as the universal place where ideas worth while are exchanged and shared. The drawing together of the Americas, ladies and gentlemen, has

long been dreamed of and desired. It is a matter of peculiar gratification, therefore, to see this great thing happen; to see the Americas drawing together, and not drawing together upon any insubstantial foundation of mere sentiment.

After all, even friendship must be based upon a perception of common sympathies, of common interests, of common ideals, and of common purposes. Men cannot be friends unless they intend the same things, and the Americas have more and more realized that in all essential particulars they intend the same thing with regard to their thought and their life and their activities. To be privileged, therefore, to see this drawing together in friendship and communion, based upon these solid foundations, affords everyone who looks on with open eyes peculiar satisfaction and joy; and it has seemed to me that the language of science, the language of impersonal thought, the language of those who think, not along the lines of individual interest but along what are intended to be the direct and searching lines of truth itself, was a very fortunate language in which to express this community of interest and of sympathy. Science affords an international language just as commerce also affords a universal language, because in each instance there is a universal purpose, a universal general plan of action, and it is a pleasing thought to those who have had something to do with scholarship that scholars have had a great deal to do with sowing the seeds of friendship between nation and nation. Truth recognizes no national boundaries. Truth permits no racial prejudices; and when men come to know each other and to recognize equal intellectual strength and equal intellectual sincerity and a common intellectual purpose, some of the best foundations of friendship are already laid.

But, ladies and gentlemen, our thought cannot pause at the artificial boundaries of the fields of science and of commerce. All boundaries that divide life into sections and interests are artificial, because life is all of a piece. You cannot treat part of it without by implication and indirection treating all of it, and the field of science is not to be distinguished from the field of life any more than the field of commerce is to be distinguished from the general field of life.

No one who reflects upon the progress of science or

the spread of the arts of peace or the extension and perfection of any of the practical arts of life can fail to see that there is only one atmosphere that these things can breathe, and that is an atmosphere of mutual confidence and of peace and of ordered political life among the nations. Amidst war and revolution even the voice of science must for the most part be silent, and revolution tears up the very roots of everything that makes life go steadily forward and the light grow from generation to generation. For nothing stirs passion like political disturbance, and passion is the enemy of truth.

These things were realized with peculiar vividness and said with unusual eloquence in a recent conference held in this city for the purpose of considering the financial relations between the two continents of America, because it was perceived that financiers can do nothing without the coöperation of governments, and that if merchants would deal with one another, laws must agree with one another; that you cannot make laws vary without making them contradict, and that amidst contradictory laws the easy flow of commercial intercourse is impossible, and that, therefore, a financial congress naturally led to all the inferences of politics. For politics I conceive to be nothing more than the science of the ordered progress of society along the lines of greatest usefulness and convenience to itself. I have never in my own mind admitted the distinction between the other departments of life and politics. Some people devote themselves so exclusively to politics that they forget there is any other part of life, and so soon as they do they become that thing which is described as a "mere politician." Statesmanship begins where these connections so unhappily lost are reëstablished. The statesman stands in the midst of life to interpret life in political action.

The conference to which I have referred marked the consciousness of the two Americas that economically they are very dependent upon one another, that they have a great deal that is desirable they should exchange and share with one another, that they have kept unnaturally and unfortunately separated and apart when they had a manifest and obvious community of interest; and the object of that con

ference was to ascertain the practical means by which the commercial and practical intercourse of the continents could be quickened and facilitated. And where events move statesmen, if they be not indifferent or be not asleep, must think and act.

For my own part I congratulate myself upon living in a time when these things, always susceptible of intellectual demonstration, have begun to be very widely and universally appreciated, and when the statesmen of the two American continents have more and more come into candid, trustful, mutual conference, comparing views as to the practical and friendly way of helping one another, and of setting forward every handsome enterprise on this side of the Atlantic.

But these gentlemen have not conferred without realizing that back of all the material community of interest of which I have spoken there lies and must lie a community of political interest. I have been told a very interesting fact-I hope it is true that while this Congress has been discussing science, it has been, in spite of itself, led into the feeling that behind the science there was some inference with regard to politics, and that if the Americans were to be united in thought they must in some degree sympathetically be united in action. What these statesmen, who have been conferring from month to month in Washington, have come to realize, that back of the community of material interest there is a community of political interest.

I hope I can make clear to you in what sense I use these words. I do not mean a mere partnership in the things that are expedient. I mean what I was trying to indicate a few moments ago, that you cannot separate politics from these things, that you cannot have real intercourse of any kind amidst political jealousies, which is only another way of saying that you cannot commune unless you are friends, and that friendship is based upon your political relations with each other perhaps more than upon any other kind of relationship between nations. If nations are politically suspicious of one another, all their intercourse is embarrassed. That is the reason, I take it, if it be true, as I hope it is, that your thoughts even during this Congress, though the questions you are called upon to consider are apparently so

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