The daily morning journal and courier., 1903-05-01
WORLDS FAIR DEDICATED
lcontinued from Firgt Page.)

nemorate the hundredth anniversary of the event which more than any other, after the foundation of the govern ment and always excepting it's preser- Vation, determined the character of our national Predetermined that we should be great expanding nation instead of relatively asmall and stationary one.
 Of course it was not with the Louis lana Purchase that our career of eX- pansion began. In the middle of the Revolutionary war the Illinois region and Indiana was addeI to our domain by force of arms, as a sequel to the ad- venturous expedition of George Rogers Clarke and his frontier rifiemen. Later the treaties of Jay and Pickney mate rially extended our real boundaries to the west. But none of these events was so striking a character as to fix the popular imagination. The old thirteen colonies had always claimed that their rights stretched westward to the Mis- sissippi, and vague and unreal though these claims were until made good by conquest, settlement and diplomacy, they still served to give the impression z that the earliest westward movements of our people were little more than the filling in of alraedy existing national boundaries.
 But there could be no illusion about the acquisition of the vast territory be- yond the Mississippi, stretching west ward to the Pacific, which in that day was known as Louisiana. This im- mense region was admittedly the terri tory of a foreign power, of a European IYi of hod laid claim to foot of it. Its acquisi- tion could in no sense be treated as rounding out any existing claims. When we acquired it we made evident once for all that consciously and of set purpose we had embarked on a career of expansion, that we had taken our place among those daring and hardy nations who risk much with the hope s and desire of winning high position among the great powers of the earth. AS is so often the case fn nature, the law of development of living organ ism showed itself in it's actual work ings to be wiser than the wisdom of the Wfsest .., .,.:s-, .
 This work of expansion was by far the greatest work of our people during y adoption of the Constitution and the outbreak of the civil war. There were other questions of real moment and i'm portance, and there we're many which at the time seemed such to those en- gagged in answering them: but the greatest feat of our forefathers of those generations was the deed of the men E who, with pack train or wagon train, t,n horseback, on foot, or by boat upon Bhe waters, pushed the frontier ever westward across the continent.
 Never before had the world seen the kind of national expansion which gave our people all that part of the Ameri- can continent lying west of the thirteen original states; the greatest landmark in which was the Louisiana Purchase B Our triumph in this process of expan- sion was indissolubly bound up with the success of our peculiar kind of fed eral government; and this success has been So complete that because of its very completeness we now sometimes fail to appreciate not only the all-in- 1. portance, but the tremenrous difficulty of the problem with which our nation was originally faced.
 When our forefathers joined to call ' into being this nation, they undertook 9 task for which there was but little encouraging precedent. The develop ment of civilization from the earliest period seemed to show the truth of two propositions: In the first place, it had < always proved exceedingly difficult to q secure both freedom and strength in any government; and in the second X place, it had always proved well-nigh impossible for nation to expand with out either breaking up or becoming centralized tydanny. With the success of our effort to combine strong and x efficient national union, able to put 5i down disorder at home and to maintain our honor and interest abroad, I have <. not now to deal. This success was sig nal and all-important, but it was by no \ means unprecedented in the same sense J that our type of expansion was unpre- Eedented The history of Rome and of Greece illustrates very we'll the two types of expansion which had taken place in ancient time and which had been universally accepted as the only possible types up to the period when as < a nation we ourselves began to take possession of this continent. The Gre . elan states performed remarkable feats of colonization but each colony as soon as created became entirely independent of the mother state, and in after years was almost as apt to prove it's enemy as its friend. Local self-government, local independence, was secured, but -only by the absolute sacrifice of any, thing resembling national unity. In consequence, the Greek world, for all its wonderful briliancy and the extraordi- nary artistic. literary and philosophical development which has made all man. kind its debtors for the ages, was yet wholly unable to withstand a formida- ble foreign foe, save spasmodically. As soon as powerful, permanent en- pires arose on it's outskirts, the Greek states in the neighborhood of such em- pires fell under their sway. National power and greatness were completely sacrificed to local liberty. With Rome the exact opposite oc- cured. The imperial city rose to ab- solute dominion over all the peoples of Italy and then expanded her rule over the entire civilized worul by a process V. 4afE T