After these words, I can not understand the corrections which the representative of Mexico has wished to address to me when I said that the policy of the United States was not favorable to treaties. I drop this incident, and continue replying to Mr. Henderson.

The distinguished chairman of the delegation of the inviting Government speaks to us of the hard conditions exacted by the Argentine Delegates, to enable the United States to invigorate its commerce with the continent. The Delegate now having the floor has not exacted or asked a solitary thing, and much less has he proposed to impose free trade with Europe as a condition of continental trade. I state, and maintain, that under a protective tariff American manufacturers will not enter free markets so long as that protection is maintained against Europe, even if it should be set aside for America by means of a zollverein. I have attacked a system, but I have not disposed of foreign resources with prodigality. Between protection and absolute free trade is the light tax which meets the necessities of life, and from which we ourselves can not separate; nor, then, would we have advised it to friendly nations, even though they represent an opulence beyond

measure.

Mr. Henderson himself agrees with the opinion I have advanced when he shows three stages in the natural growth of a people-that of agriculture, that of manufacture, and that of commerce-exactly the same stages indicated by Frederic Lizt, and which leads to these conclusions: "The people once rich should approach by degrees the principle of free trade so as to keep their agriculturists and manufacturers from idleness." At the first stage protection is necessary, the second justifies it, and the third rejects it. I have not said nor maintained anything else than this with respect to the United States, which is now at the pinnacle of the development of its riches. Protection will fatally wound the foreign trade for manufactured articles while there exists in the world a market which exports equally and which can produce them without restrictions. The honorable Delegate has not replied to my argument on cottons which are shipped

from America for Europe to manufacture, and afterwards returned to the United States in the amount of $27,000,000. He explains this economic phenomenon as the whim of rich people. It is a pity that cottons are not the luxury of the rich instead of the inheritance and covering of the poor; otherwise the argument would have been answered.

The honorable Mr. Henderson informs me not without marked emotion that rails from Pittsburgh have succeeded in entering Mexico. I am glad of this success, and would wish that it should not be limited to a bordering nation, but that it should extend to all the world, struggling with the others against insurance and transportation freights; but if the honorable Delegate wishes to prove by that fact that I fell into a contradiction, I shall have to repeat my words. "I shall not speak," I said, "of manufactures of iron and steel because they succeed in entering our markets, although with a slow step." His argument, then, is far from disconcerting me.

The honorable Delegate speaks of the proper complaints which Europe could make because of the unfavorable balance of trade with the United States, but the trade of Europe is too extensive to complain. I have shown in my reply to Mr. Flint how France, Germany, and Belgium feel the unfavorable balance of trade with the Argentine Republic, but this does not prove the liberality of the United States with America when its products are here taxed at 80 per cent. The honorable Delegate says that the United States could give up its foreign commerce with all the world and there would still remain forty-two prosperous and rich nations; that favoring breezes would swell the sails of vessels crossing the Great Lakes, and that production would be transformed but not diminished.

My distinguished friend here talks like a citizen, but not like a statesman. Commercial relations amounting to $1,500,000,000, which the very Government Mr. Henderson represents proposes to encourage, can not be struck out by a stroke of the pen or a burst of eloquence. I know that the immense and rich territories of the United States constitute a part of the terrestrial globe, that they revolve with it around the luminous orb and receive the influences.

of heat and the seasons like the rest of the world, seeking and sustaining on the earth the life of contact with all the rich centers of civilization; but my distinguished friend presents us a firmament made up of forty-two fixed stars, and I sorrow that he should desire to destroy the universal harmony and the life of relationship in which the countries of the globe move like the bodies in the celestial sphere.

If I allowed myself to be carried away by the exaltations of national sentiment, I should reply to Mr. Henderson that the United States should have written on their monumental wall, “Here we neither buy nor sell," the Argentine Republic would not be less prosperous. It would continue to receive 300,000 immigrants annually; we would not deprive ourselves of the conceptions of art and science which come to us from the brain of the world; we would not stop paying our debt, economizing on hunger and thirst (as was once said by a magistrate who presided over our destinies at a critical time), maintaining the credit and the name of the Argentine Nation in the principal money market of the world. Our lands would not be less fertile, the exports for 1890 would not be recorded at a lower figure than 170,000,000; wools would continue to be coveted by all free markets, and the cereals, which reached this year 100,000,000, would be resigned at the end to these threatening absences.

When the honorable General Henderson thus expressed himself he did not properly understand the opinion of the Government he worthily represents. We have been called together by the United States to improve our commercial relations and not to discuss their suppression. A continent is not called together for the purpose of informing it that its relations and contact are in every way unnecessary to the inviting Government. Why should we discuss a common coin if it is not the instrument of trade and the United States does not need it with us? Why reform customs and port regulations if the vessels which now cross the ocean may be at any time closed up in Lake Michigan or Ontario?

I think that the eloquent remarks of my distinguished

friend may have been heard under the dome of the Capitol when the inviting act was under discussion; but once passed, and the representatives of all the nations gathered together by virtue of it, I consider the outburst of national pride entirely uncalled for.

The honorable Delegate asks us to express our views upon reciprocity treaties, and he advises us to grasp (these are his words) a situation which will not again present itself to us. I have to remind him that I represent a nation which is sufficient unto itself and its sovereignty, and which has not come here to take advantage of the prosperity of others. General Henderson may let the hammer fall upon the boxes of the Treasury; the Argentine Republic will make no bid, even though the flying wings with which the Scythians adorned the arms of Fortune. should not offer it to us again.

The honorable Delegate appears to be surprised at my having spoken of the order and freedom of my country, forgetting how much he himself has told us of the wealth of his. That remark had an object. I know that the Spanish American countries are judged by the light of their past errors, that when we are not considered under the pressure of a military despotism we are represented mounted on the war-horse and ever ready for the revolution of the morrow. Should I have to justify that belief, I should recall the allusion made by the honorable Delegate to the revolutions of a sister Republic. I congratulate myself that the sons of the illustrious Lincoln have. to go back twenty-five years to encounter the shots of a civil contest. The Spanish Americans have turned their backs forever on those dark days; they were the results of this century, in which no country on earth has acquired its rights without bloodshed. Let us bow reverently before the fathers of our liberty, without confounding with barbarity what was the result of the times and of necessity. New and clear horizons open to-day to the free nations under the auspices of concord and of peace.

The Argentine Republic was among the first to express itself with generous aspirations and wishes, and before, long before, submitting the basis of arbitration it had put

it into practice with its friend the Republic of Chili, and it had stipulated for it with Brazil. A dispute over territory existed when an unfortunate war was begun, not with the heroic and brave people, but with the Government of Paraguay. The people of the Argentine then declared that it was not victory but arbitration which accorded rights, and it was the President of the United States who decided our question; arms were abandoned, and the people embraced in fraternal friendship. Not only have we been in that part of America the promoters and active agents of arbitration, but we come to uphold it here; and when the delegate from Venezuela lifted his voice in this room asking an impartial and humane vote in favor of arbitration to settle its question with England, he knows well that the Venezuelans found a sympathetic echo in the hearts of the Argentine delegates, and on our own part we shall never deplore too deeply that the resolution was opposed by the distinguished Mr. Trescot, and that it has not been reported to the honorable conference, so that we might vote in favor of it with the alterations which we indicated to its author.

Would to God that the wings of my sentiment could bear the wishes and hopes for American solidarity which I dedicate to a troubled sister from the very heart of the country of Monroe.

The Spanish-American Republics are misjudged when they are considered as rebellious to ideas of peace; they do not hesitate before the problems of the present nor the complications of the future, because they are persuaded that peace will improve while war will injure them.

Give them at least time to justify themselves, remembering that their emancipation dates from but yesterday, and that the nations preceding us did not escape the troublesome element of dissension.

Before concluding this reply I should indicate my official position in the Conference.

The Chair saw fit to appoint me a member of the Committee on Customs Union and I accepted the appointment as an act of submission, but not willingly, because I have never had the honor to nestle in the respectable lap of