84 FINAL ACT OF SECOND PAN AMERICAN SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS. 



nent would greatly benefit Pan America; for the presence of Latin Ameri- 

 can professors at the universities of the United States would enable the 

 people of the North to understand as never before, not merely the 

 difficulties of Latin America, but the progress made in spite of all those 

 difficulties; for the visiting professors, coming alike from Latin 

 America and the United States, would inform themselves as to the 

 methods of instruction, political aims, purposes, and ideals of the coun- 

 tries in which they temporarily reside, and on returning to their 

 homes would form a center of international good understanding. With- 

 out underestimating the value of formal agreement reached through diplo- 

 matic channels, experience shows us that informal cooperation with 

 Nations is a great factor in the progress toward international unity, and 

 the better understanding produced by the presence of exchange profes- 

 sors, the hospitable and sympathetic reception which each professor 

 would receive, the contributions which each would make in the press, by 

 means of articles in magazines and perhaps in book form, would undoubt- 

 edly be of great service to the public, which, after all, determines inter- 

 national relations in all countries possessing constitutional and repre- 

 sentative goveinments. 



Heretofore the advantages likely to accrue from the interchange of 

 professors has been considered ; but the results reasonably to be expected 

 from the interchange of students in the universities and academies of 

 the American Republics, can not be overestimated, for students in the 

 formative period are peculiarly impressionable by their intellectual 

 and social environment. The education of young men picked from the 

 various American Republics would necessarily make them friends of the 

 countries in which they studied, sympathetic expounders of the institu- 

 tions and enlightened critics of the Governments with which they were 

 made familiar. Not a little of the friendliness existing between certain 

 European countries and the United States is due to the residence of 

 American students in foreign countries and at foreign universities. We 

 may, therefore, confidently expect like, indeed greater, results from the 

 interchange of American students, and predict, with very considerable 

 certainty, the popularization of institutions of the Americas and of 

 educational methods. In a word, intellectual, political, and social under- 

 standing is destined to result from their presence in the various American 

 Republics. 



It is a truism that misunderstanding often arises from the lack of 

 acquaintance of the contending parties, and the exchange professors, by 

 disseminating knowledge, by bringing the various peoples into close 

 social and intellectual contact, would go far to disarm suspicion and to 



