Address of welcome of Señor Don Santiago González Guinán, President of the State of Carabobo, delivered at Valencia, March 25, 1912, by the Comandante in the name of the State Executive.
Your Excellency: It would have been a pleasure to the government of the State and also to the people of Valencia to present its respects and demonstrate its sympathy with you by a feast of greater [Page 1360] splendor, but your rapid transit through the city scarcely affords us sufficient time to offer this glass of champagne in the station park and without other ornaments than nature’s green foliage and the blue dome of a tropical sky, and this is possible only through the consent of your excellency to stop a moment in spite of your limited time.
In thus affording me, through your courtesy, the opportunity of carrying out in this way the part of the program assigned to me by the Government of Venezuela in connection with your visit, I take occasion, moved both by my personal feelings and the natural impulse of the moment, to impress upon your mind the sincerity with which I drink to the welfare of your wife, the lasting memory of your trip, the reciprocal cordiality of Presidents Gómez and Taft, and, lastly, to your great country, which as a unique instance in history has attained to a conquest of rights without shedding of blood and which, in the midst of the wonderful development of its civilization, fully meets the aspirations of the human race in the unparalleled progress of its democratic institutions. Your excellency’s health.