before had the pleasure, in another southern city, of addressing the
Southern Commercial Congress. I then spoke of what the future seemed to
hold in store for this region, which so many of us love and toward the
future of which we all look forward with so much confidence and hope.
But another theme directed me here this time. I do not need to speak of
the South. She has, perhaps, acquired the gift of speaking for herself.
I come because I want to speak of our present and prospective relations
with our neighbors to the south. I deemed it a public duty, as well as a
personal pleasure, to be here to express for myself and for the
Government I represent the welcome we all feel to those who represent
the Latin-American States.

The future, ladies and gentlemen, is going to be very different for this
hemisphere from the past. These States lying to the south of us, which
have always been our neighbors, will now be drawn closer to us by
innumerable ties, and, I hope, chief of all by the tie of a common
understanding of each other. Interest does not tie nations together; it
sometimes separates them. But sympathy and understanding does unite
them, and I believe that by the new route that is just about to be
opened, while we physically cut two continents asunder, we spiritually
unite them. It is a spiritual union which we seek.

I wonder if you realize, I wonder if your imaginations have been filled
with the significance of the tides of commerce. Your Governor alluded in
very fit and striking terms to the voyage of Columbus, but Columbus took
his voyage under compulsion of circumstances. Constantinople had been
captured by the Turks, and all the routes of trade with the East had
been suddenly closed. If there was not a way across the Atlantic to open
those routes again, they were closed forever; and Columbus set out not
to discover America, for he did not know that it existed, but to