Never daunted, never calculating defeat, every man determined to die or conquer, every man knowing his duty, how to do it—­the soldiers and seamen of America were invincible.  Spanish fleets and Spanish armies vanished before them as mists before the morning sun; the nations of the earth stood amazed in the presence of such quick and decisive triumphs, at what America had done and at what, they now understood, America could do.

The war is ended.  It would ill become me to say what details shall enter into the treaty of peace which America is concluding with her vanquished foe.  I stand in the presence of the chief magistrate of the republic.  To him it belongs by right of official position and of personal wisdom to prescribe those details.  The country has learned from the acts of his administration that to his patriotism, his courage, his prudence, she may well confide her safety, her honor, her destiny, her peace.  Whatever the treaty of Sapin, America will be pleased when appended to this treaty is the name of William McKinley.

“What I may speak of on this occasion is the results of the war, manifest even in this hour to America and to the world, transcending and independent of all treaties of peace, possessing for America and the world a meaning far mightier than mere accumulation of material wealth or commercial concessions or territorial extension.

“To do great things, to meet fitly great responsibilities, a nation, like a person, must be conscious of its dignity and its power.  The consciousness of what she is and what she may be has come to America.  She knows that she is a great nation.  The elements of greatness were not imparted by the war; but they were revealed to her by the war, and their vitality and their significance were increased through the war.

“To take its proper place among the older nations of the earth a nation must be known as she is to those nations.  The world to-day as ne’er before knows and confesses the greatness and the power of America.  The world to-day admires and respects America.  The young giant of the West, heretofore neglected and almost despised in his remoteness and isolation, has begun to move as becomes his stature; the world sees what he is and pictures what he may be.

“All this does not happen by chance or accident.  An all-ruling Providence directs the movements of humanity.  What we witness is a momentous dispensation from the master of men.  ’Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo—­with the revolution of centuries there is born to the world a new order of things,’ sang the Mantuan poet at the birth of the Augustan age.  So to-day we proclaim a new order of things has appeared.