“Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen:  Spain had long been our near and dangerous neighbor.  Its people have a degree of reverence almost superstitious for monarchy, and regard republican institutions with great disfavor.  It has been said of Spain that some incurable vice in her organization, or it may be in the temper of her people, neutralizes all of the advantages she ought to derive from her sturdy hardihood, her nearly perfect capacity for endurance and the somber genius alike for war, for art and for literature, which has so often marked her sons.  While this seems to be true, the Spaniard is not only a formidable antagonist, but there is a wealth of interest and charm in his rich, romantic history which commands the admiration of a generous foeman.  This must be accorded, whether we contemplate that ancient people as they alternately resist the aggressions of Carthage and of Rome, the fierce cavalry of Hamilcar, the legions of Scipio, of Pompey and of Caesar, or in more recent times the achievements of their renowned infantry which broke to fragments the best armies of Europe, or the infuriated people in arms against the hitherto unconquered veterans of Napoleon, or but now as with patient and dogged courage, with flaming volleys, they vainly strive to hold the works of Caney and San Juan against the irresistible and rushing valor of the American soldier.  In art the Spaniard has been not less famous.  In the royal collection of Madrid, in the venerable cathedrals of Seville, in the Louvre, in the London National Gallery, the lover of the beautiful may be charmed by the warmth of color, the accuracy of technique, the rounded outline and saintly salvation of Murillo.

“Many a quaint moralist, many a stately poet, many a priestly chronicler attests the genius of Spanish literature, but if these had not been, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza had been its title to immortality.  The admirable attributes of Spanish character nowhere found warmer appreciation than with our own countrymen.  What Prescott did for the statecraft, and stern martial renown of the Spaniards, Washington Irving, with melodious prose and gentle humor, surpassed in his kindly portrayal of Spanish character in his charming romance, The Conquest of Granada.  It is perhaps due to the drollery and Addisonian humor of that gifted American that we have never been able to estimate the Spaniard quite so seriously as he estimates himself, or, indeed, as his stern and uncompromising nature deserves.  The truth is, Spanish policy has ever been insidiously and persistently inimical to the American people, and has culminated in deeds more atrocious than those which have rendered infamous the baleful memory of Pedro the Cruel.

“We all know how in 1492 his holiness, Alexander VI., in order to prevent unseemly collisions between Christian princes, published a bull by which he assigned to Spain all discoveries lying west of an imaginary line drawn 300 leagues to the westward of the Cape Verde islands.  All discoveries to the east were confined to Portugal.