[Telegram.—Translation.]
(Received 1.40 p.m.)
His Excellency John Hay, Secretary of State:
I have the privilege and the honor of notifying you that the Government of the Republic of Panama have been pleased to designate me as its envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary near the Government of the United States. In selecting for its first representative at Washington a veteran servant and champion of the Panama Canal, my Government has evidently sought to show that it considers a loyal and earnest devotion to the success of that most heroic conception of human genius as both a solemn duty and the essential purpose of its existence. I congratulate myself, sir, that my first official duty should be to respectfully request you to convey to His Excellency the President of the United States, on behalf of the people of Panama, an expression of the grateful sense of their obligation to his Government. In extending her generous hand so spontaneously to her latest born, the Mother of the American Nations is prosecuting her noble mission as the liberator and the educator of the peoples. In spreading her protecting wings over the territory of our Republic the American Eagle has sanctified it. It has rescued it from the barbarism of unnecessary and wasteful civil wars to consecrate it to the destiny assigned to it by Providence, the service of humanity, and the progress of civilization.