The Savannah morning news., 1903-05-01

dedication was as 1olloWS:
Mr.. President. Ladies and Gentle
men: At the outset of my address let
me recall to the minds of my hearers
that the soil upon which we stand, be-
fore it was ours, was successfully the
possession of two mighty empires,
Spain and France, whose sons made a
deathless record of heroism in the early
annals of the New World. No history
of the Western country can be written
without paying heed to the wonderful
part played therein in the early days
by the soldiers, missionaries, explorers,
and traders, who did their work for the
honor of the proud banners of France
and CASTLE. While the settlers of
English-speaking stock, and those of
Dutch German, and scandinavian ORR
gin who were associated with them,
were still clinging close to the Eastern
seaboard the pioneers of Spain and of
France had penetrated deep into ting
hitherto unknown wilderness of the
West and had wandered far and wide
within the boundaries of what is now
our mighty country. The very cities
themselves-St. Louis, New Orleans,
Santa Fe, New Mexico-bear witness
by their titles to the nationalities of
their founders. 1t was not until the
Revolution had begun that the English
speaking settlers pushed west across
the Alleghenies, and not until a CEN
fury ago that they entered in to pos
sess the land upon which we now stand.
"Of course it was not with the
Louisiana Purchase that our career of
expansion began. In the middle of the
Revolutionary War the Illinois region,
including the present states of ILL
nois and Indiana, was added to our
domain by force Of arms, as a sequel
to the adventurous expedition of
George Rogers Clarke and his frontier
rif1emen. Later the treaties of Jay
and Pinckney materially extended our
real boundaries to the west. But none
of these events was of so striking a
character as to fix the popular imagi-
nation. The old thirteen colonies had
always claimed that their rights
stretched westward to the Mississippi,
and vague and unreal though these
claims were until made good by con-
quest. settlement, and diplomacy, they
still served to give the impression that
the earliest westward movements OF
our people were little more than the
filling in of already existing national
boundaries.
Expansion the Great work.
This work of expansion was by far
the greatest work of our people dur
ing the years that interviewed between
the adoption Of the constitution and
the outbreak of the Civil War. There
were other questions of real moment
and Importance, and there were many
which at the time seemed such To
those engaged in answering them; but
the greatest feat of our forefathers Of
those generations was the deed of the
men who, with pack train or wagon
train, on horseback, on foot, or by
boat upon the waters, pushed the
frontier ever witnessed across the
continent.
Never before had the world seen
the kind of national expansion which
gave our people all that part of the
American continent lying west of the
thirteen original states the greatest
landmark in which was the Louisiana
Purchase Our triumph in this pro-
cess of expansion was indissolubly |
bound up with the success of our |
peculiar kind of federal government; |
and this success has been so COM |
plete that because of its very COM |
pleteness we now sometimes fail to |
appreciate not only the all-importance |
but the tremendous difficulty of the |
problem with which our nation was |
originally faced.
I'VE expanded by carving the wilder |
ness into territories and out of these |
territories building new states when |
once they had received as permanent |
SclllSIS q SulANlCilN HhAA1DCI VI Jul O"h |
people. Being a practical nation we
have never tried to force on any sec |
ton of our new territory an unsuitable |
form of government merely because it |
was suitable for another section under |
different conditions. OF the territory |
covered by the Louisiana Purchase a |
portion was given statehood within a |
few years. Another portion has not |
been admitted to statehood, although |
n no al Y1Gad--a Though don hf- ]
less it soon win be. In each case we |
showed the practical governmental |
genius of our race by devising meth |
DDS suitable to meet the actual exist
ing needs; not by insisting upon the |
application of some abstract shibbo- |
leth to all our new possessions alike, no |
matter how homogeneous this applica-
ton might sometimes be.
Then Came State After state.
"Over by far the major part of the |
territory, however, our people spread |
in such numbers during the course of |
the nineteenth century that we were |
able to build up state after state, each |
with exactly the same complete local |
independence in all matters affecting |
purely it's own domestic interests as in |
any of the original thirteen states
each owing the same absolute fealty |
to the Union of all the states which |
each of the original thirteen states also |
owes-and finally each having the same |
proportional right to it's share in shap- |
ing and directing the common policy |
of the Union which is possessed by any
other state. whether of the original |
thirteen or not.
This process now seems to us part
of the natural order of things, but it
was wholly unknown until our own
people devised it. 1t seems to us
mere matter of course, a matter of
elementary right and justice, that in
the deliberations of the national rep
resentative bodies the representatives
of state which came into the Union
but yesterday stand on a footing of
exact and entire equality with those of
the commemorative whose sons once
signed the Declaration of Independence.
But this way of looking at the matter
is purely modern, and in it's origin
purely American. When Washington
during his presidency saw new states
come into the Union on a footing of
complete equality with the old, every
European nation which had colonies
still administered them as dependen-
cies, and every other mother country
treated the colonist not as a self
governing equal, but as a subject.
THE process which we began has
since been followed by all the great
peoples who were capable both of eX-
pansion and OF self-government, and
now the world accepts it as the nat
ural process, as the rule; but a CEN
fury and a quarter ago it was not
merely exceptional; it was unknown.
- Of HfmforfC Sfuuifcance