Evening times-Republican. [volume] (Marshalltown, Iowa) 1890-1923, 1903-04-30
PREslpENI,s AppREss.

st. Louis, April 30.-The assembly In
the Liberal Arts building was called to
order at 2:a5 ny President Francis.
Cardinal Gibbons delivered the invoca-
ton.
Following the invocation Senator
Thomas II. Carter, who acted as pres
ident of the day, introduced the presi-
dent, he said:
We have met here today to CONNER
ate the hundl'edth anniversary of the
event which fore than any other, after
the foundation of the government and
always excepting it's preservation, de-
termined the character of our national
life--determined that we should be q
great expanding nation instead of rel
atively small and stationary one.
OF course 1t Is not with the Louisiana
Purchase that our career of expansion
began. In the middle of the revolution
ary war, the Illinois region, including
the present state of Illinois and Indiana,
was added to our domain by force OF
arms, as sequel to the adventurous
expedition of George Rogers Clarke and
his frontier rif1emen. Later the treaties
of lay and Pinckney materially ex-
tended our real boundaries to the west.
But none of these events was of so
striking a character as to fix the pop
ular Imagination The old thirteen coll
onies 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 serve to give the impression
that the earliest westward movements
of our people We're little more than the
filling in of already existing nationa!
boundaries.
But there could be no illusion about
the acquisition of the vast territory
westward to the Pacific which in that
day was known as Louisiana. This
immense region was admittedly thu
territory of a foreign power. of Eu-
ropean kingdom. None of our people
had ever laid claim to a foot IF 1t.
It's acquisition could in no sense be
treated as rounding out any
|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
and the desire of winning
of winning high position among the
great powers of the earth. AS is so Of
ten the case in nature, the law of de-
velopment of a living organism showed
Itself i'm it's actual workings to be wiser
than the wisdom of the wisest.
Never before had the world seen the
kind of national eNpanse which gave
our people all that part of the Amer
lean continent lying west of the thir-
teen original states; the greatest land
mark in which was the Louisiana pur-
chase Our triumph in this process of
expansion was indissolubly bound up
with the success of our peculiar kind OF
federal government; and this success
has been so complete that because OF
/ its very completeness we now some
times fail to appreciate not only the
all-importance but the tremendous
difficulty of the problem with which
our nation was originally faced.
The underlying viciousness of the
Greek and Roman types of expansion
were plain enough and the remedy now
seems simple enough. But when the
fathers of the republic first formulated
1.-THE constitution under which we livs
this remedy was untried and no one
could feretell how 1t would work. They
themselves began the experiment all
most Immediately by adding new states