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Excerpt from The Visit to Costa Rica of His Excellency the Secretary of State of the United States of America Philander C. Knox But there is another benefit that we owe to your country, the greatest of all, that without which all others would be mere dross. We have cast our institutions in the moulding sand of yours. In our first attempts in the exercise of self government - the only one that deserves the decorous re spect of men - we learned to spell in your famous document of Declaration of Independence that, All men are created equal that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and consistent with these funda mental principles, as incontrovertible now at the begin ning of the 20th century as they were at the end of the 18th, we regulated our political system, and within that system, the smallest Republic of this hemisphere lives happily, Without envying others or being envied by them, in the same manner as your wonderful country enjoying all the privileges of that same system also lives contentedly, an actual demonstration of the fact that self-government, with powers distributed and limited, with liberty of speech and a free press, of effective and extensive individual rights; a gov ernment that derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, is beneficent everywhere - at least in America with that same universality of the mathematical laws, that are equally appropriate for fixing the course of the planets as they are for arranging the most humble transactions of men. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfe