ADDRESS OF HONORABLE ELIHU ROOT, 
 L SECRETARY OF STATE, AT THE 
 BANQUET OF THE CANADIAN CLUB OF 
 OTTAWA, CANADA, JANUARY 22, 1907. 
 
ADDRESS OF HONORABLE ELIHU ROOT, 
 L SECRETARY OF STATE, AT THE 
 BANQUET OF THE CANADIAN CLUB OF 
 OTTAWA, CANADA, JANUARY 22, 1907. 
 
MAR 10 mi 
 
 pl059 
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 Mr. Chairman, Your Excellency, Sir IVilfrid, 
 Gentlemen of the Canadian Club of Ottawa: 
 I thank you for your most cordial and 
 friendly greeting. 1 beg you to believe that 
 1 am deeply sensible of the honor conferred 
 upon me by the presence at this luncheon table 
 of the Governor-General and the Premier of 
 Canada. Another kindly greeting has been 
 received by me, since 1 took my seat at the 
 table, from a gentleman who, for reasons which 
 you will readily appreciate, was unable to ob- 
 tain a seat in the room. I will take the liberty 
 of reading it to you. It is a telegraphic dispatch 
 dated Jamaica, January 20, received in Wash- 
 ington yesterday and repeated to me: 
 
 Honorable Elihu Root, 
 
 Secretary of State. 
 Jamaica profoundly grateful to your excellency for ex- 
 pression of 'sympathy and for the very practical aid so 
 kindly given by Admiral Davis and the entire particular 
 service squadron of the United States Government. 
 (Signed) Governor Swettenham. 
 
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I do not feel at all a stranger here, partly 
 perhaps because in your climate blood has to 
 be thicker than water; partly because in your 
 atmosphere everyone born and bred under the 
 common law of England and under the princi- 
 ples of justice and liberty that the English- 
 speaking race has carried the world over, 
 wherever it has gone, must breathe freely. It 
 is a full forty years since I paid my first visit to 
 Canada. At brief intervals during all that period 
 I have been returning, sometimes to one part 
 of the Dominion and sometimes to another, but 
 always keeping in touch with the course of your 
 development and with the trend of your opinion 
 and spirit. During that time what wonderful 
 things we have seen! We have seen feeble, ill- 
 compacted, separate, dependent colonies grow- 
 ing into a great and vigorous nation. We 
 have seen the two branches of the Canadian 
 people, the English speaking and the French 
 speaking, putting behind them old resentments 
 and steadily approaching each other in tightening 
 bonds of sympathy and national fellowship — a 
 happy augury for the continuance of that entente 
 cordiale which between the two great nations 
 
on the other side of the Atlantic is making for 
 the peace of the world. We have seen not 
 merely growth in population and in wealth, 
 but we have seen here great examples of con- 
 structive power, examples of a great race of 
 builders who have made and are making and 
 are to make the Western World unexampled in 
 the history of mankind. The spirit of the Norse 
 sea kings, the spirit of the great navigators, of 
 Columbus, of Vasco da Gama, and of Drake and 
 Frobisher, the spirit of the Spanish conquista- 
 dores, the spirit of men of power and might 
 who have been the great influences in the world, 
 has found its development in this Western 
 Hemisphere in the great builders, and within 
 our lives we have seen here some of the great- 
 est of the great building men of constructive 
 power and energy. We have seen and are see- 
 ing now the growth of that historic sense, the 
 growth among the people of that appreciation 
 of the great examples of their own best nature 
 which is so essential to the making of a nation; 
 and as you are drawing away, through the 
 course of successive generations, from the past 
 the great figures of the makers of Canada loom 
 
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up more and still more lofty. The courage, 
 the fortitude, the heroism, the self-devotion of 
 the men of Canada's early time stand out in 
 historic eminence from which well may flow 
 the deep and unending stream of a great na- 
 tional patriotism. Above all, we see a people 
 trained and training themselves in the art of self- 
 government, in the discussion and consideration 
 of all public questions, not only in the high 
 seats of government, but in the farmhouse and 
 the shop; in that discussion which lies at the 
 base of modern civilization, that discussion 
 which among the plain people, furnishing the 
 basis for political and social systems, differen- 
 tiates our later-day civilization from all the 
 civilizations of the past, and must give to it 
 a perpetuity that no civilization of the past 
 has had. 
 
 Lord Grey has very kindly furnished me, in 
 the last few days, with the debate which has 
 been going on in your House of Commons on 
 the subject of the fisheries modus vivendi. I 
 have been much impressed by the thoughtful, 
 temperate, and statesmanlike quality which has 
 been conspicuous in that debate. 1 am sure, 
 
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and indeed no one who reads tlie debate can 
 doubt, that whatever conclusion your Parliament 
 reaches will be a conclusion dictated by sincere 
 and intelligent and right-minded determination 
 to fulfill the full duty of your representatives 
 to the people whose rights they are bound to 
 maintain and protect. Whatever the conclusion 
 may be, however much any may differ from it, 
 all men will be bound to respect it. The exist- 
 ence of this club, the existence of similar clubs 
 in the great cities throughout your country, is 
 an augury, a good omen, for the future of Can- 
 ada. That intelligent discussion and considera- 
 tion of public questions which enables the men 
 who are not in office to perform their duty as 
 self-governors is a solid foundation for a nation 
 that shall endure. 
 
 For all these I profess, with sincerity and 
 with feeling, my admiration and my sympathy; 
 and 1 speak the sentiment of millions of my own 
 countrymen in saying that we look upon the 
 great material and spiritual progress of Canada 
 with no feelings of jealousy, but with admira- 
 tion, with hope, and with gratification. 1 count 
 myself happy to be one of those who can not 
 
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be indifferent to the glories and achievements 
 of the race from which they spring. And with 
 my pride in my own land, with the pride that 
 it is a part of my inheritance to take in England, 
 is added the pride that I feel in this great, 
 hardy, vigorous, self-governing people of Can- 
 ada, who love justice and liberty. 
 
 There have been in the past, and in the na- 
 ture of things there will be continually arising 
 in the future, matters of difference between the 
 two nations. How could it be otherwise, with 
 adjacent seacoasts and more than three thou- 
 sand miles of boundary upon which we march ? 
 How could it be otherwise in the nature of the 
 races at work? Savage nature is never subdued 
 to the uses of man, empires are never builded, 
 save by men of vigor and power, men intense 
 in the pursuit of their objects, strong in their 
 confidence in their own opinions, engrossed in 
 the pursuit of their ends, sometimes even to the 
 exclusion of thoughtfulness for the interests and 
 feelings of others. But let us school ourselves 
 and teach our children, to believe that whatever 
 differences arise, different understandings as to 
 the facts on different sides of the boundary line, 
 
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the effect of different environment, different 
 points of view, rather than intentional or con- 
 scious unfairness, are at the base of the differ- 
 ences. After all, as we look back over the 
 records of history; after all, in the far view of 
 the future, all the differences of each day and 
 generation are but trifling compared with the 
 great fact that these two nations are pursuing 
 the same ideals of liberty and justice, are doing 
 their work side by side for the peace and 
 righteousness of the world in peace with each 
 other. 
 
 The differences of each generation loom 
 large, held close to the eye; but, after all, the 
 fact that for ninety years, under a simple ex- 
 change of notes limiting the armament of the 
 two countries, in terms which have become an 
 antiquated example of naval literature, to single 
 1 00-ton boats with single 1 8-pound cannon- 
 after all, the fact that for ninety years under 
 that simple exchange of notes we have been 
 living on either side of this three thousand 
 miles of boundary in peace, with no more 
 thought or fear of hostilities than if we were 
 the same people, is a great fact in history and 
 
a great fact of potential import for the future. 
 We celebrate great victories. Anniversaries of 
 great single events call together crowds and are 
 the subject of inspiring addresses. Within a 
 few years — eight years from now — we shall be 
 able to celebrate the centennial anniversary of 
 a hundred years of peaceful fellowship — a hun- 
 dred years during which no part of the fruits of 
 industry and enterprise has been diverted from 
 the building up of peaceful and happy homes, 
 from the exercise and promotion of religion, 
 from the education of children and the succor 
 of the distressed and unfortunate, to be ex- 
 pended in warlike attack by one people upon 
 the other. 
 
 In the meantime, our people are passing in 
 great numbers across this invisible boundary, 
 Canadians in the East and Americans in the 
 West; and in thousands of homes they and 
 their children are looking back from American 
 hillsides to a Canadian, and from Canadian 
 farms to an American, fatherland. May that 
 backward look of loving memory never be 
 turned to the hard gaze of hostility, of fear, 
 or of revenge! 1 ask you, my friends, to join 
 
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me in a sentiment: To the Canadian settlers in 
 New England and the American settlers in the 
 Canadian West— may they ever, with loyal 
 memory, do honor to the lands of their birth! 
 may they ever, with loyal citizenship, do God s 
 service to IJie countries of their adoption! 
 
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LIBRftRY OF CONGRESS 
 
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