I must ask to be excused by my distinguished colleagues for the poverty and want of science of this work and I beg that it be considered merely as a contribution towards a future study of the subject. I was asked to lend my modest assistance to the convention only a few days before the opening of the session, so that it was absolutely impossible to prepare a more elaborate work.

I ought to state at once that it is very difficult to set forth the Latin-American point of view on the inter-American policy of the United States, because, if the question be what the judgment of the South and Central American Republics is upon the subject, then the general diversities geographic, telluric, climatic and sometimes racial, the diversities of culture, interests and development, of these Republics make impossible the existence of a common point of view, though a widely different belief is held in the United States. Furthermore, the personality of Latin-America as a political entity does not mean more than a “conventional lie,” for that is what it is.

Latin-America is merely a metaphysical person, a juridical entity created by the United States to be a pattern of uniformity to which it may adjust its international policy toward the people of the South and Central part of the Continent. Latin-America is a fictitious person and therefore a conception contrary to the reality. It is a legal impossibility being a de facto impossibility.