The Secretary of State, to whom was referred the resolution of the Senate requesting the President “to institute an inquiry, by such means as in his judgment shall be deemed proper, into the present condition of the commercial relations between the United States and the Spanish American States on this continent, and between those countries and other nations, and to communicate to the Senate full and complete statements regarding the same, together with such recommendations as he may think necessary to promote the development and increase of our commerce with those regions and to secure to the United States that proportionate share of the trade of this continent to which their close relations of geographical contiguity and political friendship with all the States of America justly entitle them,” has the honor to report: 

The resolution justly regards the commercial and the political relations of the United States with the American States of Spanish origin as necessarily dependent upon each other.  If the commerce of those countries has been diverted from its natural connection with the United States, the fact may probably be partly traced to political causes, which have been swept away by the great civil convulsion in this country.

For the just comprehension of the position of this Government in the American political system, and for the causes which have failed to give it hitherto the influence to which it is properly entitled by reason of its democratic system and of the moderation and sense of justice which have distinguished its foreign policy through successive Administrations from the birth of the nation until now, it is necessary to make a brief notice of such measures as affect our present relations to the other parts of this continent.

The United States were the first of the European colonies in America to arrive at maturity as a people and assume the position of an independent republic.  Since then important changes have taken place in various nations and in every part of the world.  Our own growth in power has been not the least remarkable of all the great events of modern history.

When, at the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, having conquered by arms our right to exist as a sovereign state, that right was at length recognized by treaties, we occupied only a narrow belt of land along the Atlantic coast, hemmed in at the north, the west, and the south by the possessions of European Governments, or by uncultivated wastes beyond the Alleghanies, inhabited only by the aborigines.  But in the very infancy of the United States far-sighted statesmen saw and predicted that, weak in population and apparently restricted in available territory as the new Republic then was, it had within it the germs of colossal grandeur, and would at no remote day occupy the continent of America with its institutions, its authority, and its peaceful influence.