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Quebec. 31st July, 1936.
Mr. President, as the personal representative of His Majesty the King, I offer my most cordial greeting to the First Citizen of the United States. Canada welcomes you, Sir, not only for you own sake as an old acquaintance - for I think you know well our Eastern coasts - but also as one of the major forces today in the statesmanship of the world. She welcomes you not less as the head of a country to whose people she is bound by ties of kinship and tradition; a country whose problems she shares, and whose future deeply concerns her own. As a North American nation we have much in common with your; yet we have each our own idioms and characteristics. Our differences, understood and respected, are, not less than our similarities, a basis for cooperation and friendship.
Canada is a free and a sovereign nation and for generations she has dwelt side by side with yours in perfect amity - an example to all the world of how civilised neighbours should live together. She is also a principal constituent part of the British Empire, and as such she is a link between your great Republic and that Commonwealth of Nations which covers so large a part of the habitable globe. Mr. President, it is my earnest hope - and I know that it is also yours - that our friendship and goodwill may grow, to a still closer understanding and become that strongest of human creations, a thing about which men do not argue but which they can take for granted. It is my prayer that, not by any political or other alliance, but through thinking the same thoughts and pursuing the same purpose, the Republic of the United
