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This is the earliest General Conference Address the Grampa has found for J. Reuben Clark, Jr. It was given several years before his call as a General Authority. The occasion was his appointment as United States Ambassador to Mexico.
My brethren and sisters, it is indeed an honor to be asked to say a few words to you this morning. I recall a statement that was made by the great Dr. Karl G. Maeser. He said: "There are two occasions in a man's life when it becomes him to say little. The one is at the beginning of his work, and the other at the end of it." I stand at the beginning of my new work.
I am proud and grateful for my ancestry. I am proud and grateful for my association with you. I am grateful for the testimony which has come to me of the truth. I pray that always there shall be with me the Spirit of God.
As President Grant has said, I am to be appointed American Ambassador to Mexico. I have had some residence in that country, and I have come to have for that people a sympathy and a love I have not felt for any other people.
Mexico is our neighbor. We should treat Mexico as a neighbor. The great Mosaic law which had in it the doctrine, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," taught also: "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." On that great day in the Temple, during the last week of the Savior's mission on this earth, when they were trying to tempt him into some kind of a confession upon which they could base a prosecution, a lawyer asked him what were the great commandments. and he replied:
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself."
J. Reuben Clark, Jr., Conference Report, October 1930, p.98
James, in his epistle, speaks of the law. "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" as the "royal law" and while we are accustomed sometimes to think that nations do not deal one with another on such a basis, I may he permitted to say that the fundamental principle of international conduct, international relationship, and law, is that you shall ask the other nation to do nothing which you are not yourself willing to do, and that you shall complain about nothing which the other nation does and which you yourself do.
When John Adams went to Paris to assist Franklin and Jay and Lawrence in the negotiation of the treaty of peace with Great Britain at the end of our Revolutionary War, he found them involved in a discussion as to whether or not they should pay the debts that were due to the Tory colonists. When the matter was presented to him he said that he wanted the Tories paid, that he had "no notion of cheating anybody."
What we thus said in our pride as a young, new-born nation surely we can say now that we have the power and the strength that has come to no other nation during the whole history of mankind.
God grant that there comes to me in my work for I go to it with something of a knowledge of what it means--his Spirit to guide me, that I may represent the people of the United States adequately in my life, in my attitude, in my work. God give to me the faith and the prayers of you, my brethren and sisters, that I may be able to perform my mission honorably, I ask this in the name of Jesus. Amen.
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