Events subsequent to that date have tended to place us in a position to retrieve our mistakes, among which events may be particularly named the suppression of the rebellion, the manifestation of our undeveloped and unexpected military power, the retirement of the French from Mexico, and the abolition of slavery in the United States.

There is good reason to believe that the latter fact has had an important influence in our favor in Spanish America.  It has caused us to be regarded there with more sympathetic as well as more respectful consideration.  It has relieved those Republics from the fear of filibusterism which had been formerly incited against Central America and Mexico in the interest of slave extension, and it has produced an impression of the stability of our institutions and of our public strength sufficient to dissipate the fears of our friends or the hopes of those who wish us ill.

Thus there exists in the Spanish American Republics confidence toward the United States.  On our side they find a feeling of cordial amity and friendship, and a desire to cultivate and develop our common interests on this continent.  With some of these States our relations are more intimate than with others, either by reason of closer similarity of constitutional forms, of greater commercial intercourse, of proximity in fact, or of the construction or contemplated construction of lines of transit for our trade and commerce between the Atlantic and the Pacific.  With several of them we have peculiar treaty relations.  The treaty of 1846 between the United States and New Granada contains stipulations of guaranty for the neutrality of that part of the Isthmus within the present territory of Colombia, and for the protection of the rights of sovereignty and property therein belonging to Colombia.  Similar stipulations appear in the treaty of 1867 with Nicaragua, and of July, 1864, with Honduras.  Those treaties (like the treaty of alliance made with France in 1778 by Dr. Franklin, Silas Deane, and Arthur Lee) constitute pro tanto a true protective alliance between the United States and each of those Republics.  Provisions of like effect appear in the treaty of April 19, 1850, between Great Britain and the United States.

Brazil, with her imperial semblance and constitutional reality, has always held relations of amity with us, which have been fortified by the opening of her great rivers to commerce.  It needs only that, in emulation of Russia and the United States, she should emancipate her slaves to place her in more complete sympathy with the rest of America.