_Cardinal Gibbons, Ladies and Gentlemen_:
It is indeed a pleasure to be received here as a guest of the first
and oldest university founded in our country west of the Mississippi
River in the Louisiana Purchase. I know your work. I have myself been
much in the West, and I have come across the traces of your work, both
among the communities of our own people and among the Indian tribes.
I thank you personally for your kind allusions to me, and would hold
myself recreant to the principles upon which this government was
founded did I not strive as Chief Executive to do fair and equal
justice to all men without regard to the way in which any man chooses
to worship his Maker.
AT THE DEDICATION CEREMONIES OF THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE EXPOSITION, ST.
LOUIS, APRIL 30, 1903
_Mr. President, Ladies, and Gentlemen_:
At the outset of my address let me recall to the minds of my
hearers that the soil upon which we stand, before it was ours, was
successively 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 Castile.
While the settlers of English-speaking stock, and those of Dutch,
German, and Scandinavian origin who were associated with them, were
still clinging close to the Eastern seaboard, the pioneers of Spain
and of France had penetrated deep into the hitherto unknown wilderness
of the West, 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—bear witness by their titles to the nationalities
of their founders. It was not until the Revolution had begun that the
English-speaking settlers pushed west across the Alleghanies, and not
until a century ago that they entered in to possess the land upon
which we now stand.
We have met here to-day to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of
the event which more than any other, after the foundation of the
Government and always excepting its preservation, determined the
character of our national life—determined that we should be a great
expanding Nation instead of relatively a small and stationary one.
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 Illinois and Indiana, was
added to our domain by force of arms, as a sequel to the adventurous
expedition of George Rogers Clark and his frontier riflemen. 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 imagination. 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 conquest, 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.
But there could be no illusion about the acquisition of the vast
territory beyond the Mississippi, stretching westward to the Pacific,
which in that day was known as Louisiana. This immense region
was admittedly the territory of a foreign power, of a European
kingdom. None of our people had ever laid claim to a foot of it.
Its acquisition 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 and desire of winning high
position among the great powers of the earth. As is so often the case
in nature, the law of development of a living organism showed itself
in its actual workings to be wiser than the wisdom of the wisest.
This work of expansion was by far the greatest work of our people
during the years that intervened 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, 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 American continent lying west
of the thirteen original States; the greatest landmark in which was
the Louisiana Purchase. 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 sometimes fail to appreciate not only the
all-importance but the tremendous difficulty of the problem with which
our Nation was originally faced.
When our forefathers joined to call into being this Nation, they
undertook a task for which there was but little encouraging precedent.
The development 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 secure both freedom and strength
in any government; and in the second place, it had always proved
wellnigh impossible for a nation to expand without either breaking
up or becoming a centralized tyranny. With the success of our effort
to combine a strong and efficient national union, able to put down
disorder at home and to maintain our honor and interest abroad, I have
not now to deal. This success was signal and all-important, but it was
by no means unprecedented in the same sense that our type of expansion
was unprecedented. The history of Rome and of Greece illustrates very
well 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 Grecian 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 its enemy as its friend. Local self-government, local
independence, was secured, but only by the absolute sacrifice of
anything resembling national unity. In consequence, the Greek world,
for all its wonderful brilliancy and the extraordinary artistic,
literary, and philosophical development which has made all mankind its
debtors for the ages, was yet wholly unable to withstand a formidable
foreign foe, save spasmodically. As soon as powerful, permanent
empires arose on its outskirts, the Greek states in the neighborhood
of such empires fell under their sway. National power and greatness
were completely sacrificed to local liberty.
With Rome the exact opposite occurred. The imperial city rose to
absolute dominion over all the peoples of Italy and then expanded
her rule over the entire civilized world by a process which kept
the nation strong and united, but gave no room whatever for local
liberty and self-government. All other cities and countries were
subject to Rome. In consequence this great and masterful race of
warriors, rulers, road-builders, and administrators stamped their
indelible impress upon all the after life of our race, and yet let an
over-centralization eat out the vitals of their empire until it became
an empty shell; so that when the barbarians came they destroyed only
what had already become worthless to the world.
The underlying viciousness of each type of expansion was plain enough
and the remedy now seems simple enough. But when the fathers of the
Republic first formulated the Constitution under which we live this
remedy was untried and no one could foretell how it would work. They
themselves began the experiment almost immediately by adding new
States to the original thirteen. Excellent people in the East viewed
this initial expansion of the country with great alarm. Exactly as
during the colonial period many good people in the mother-country
thought it highly important that settlers should be kept out of the
Ohio Valley in the interest of the fur companies, so after we had
become a Nation many good people on the Atlantic Coast felt grave
apprehension lest they might somehow be hurt by the westward growth of
the Nation. These good people shook their heads over the formation of
States in the fertile Ohio Valley which now forms part of the heart
of our Nation; and they declared that the destruction of the Republic
had been accomplished when through the Louisiana Purchase we acquired
nearly half of what is now that same Republic’s present territory. Nor
was their feeling unnatural. Only the adventurous and the far-seeing
can be expected heartily to welcome the process of expansion, for the
nation that expands is a nation which is entering upon a great career,
and with greatness there must of necessity come perils which daunt all
save the most stout-hearted.
We expanded by carving the wilderness into Territories and out of
these Territories building new States when once they had received
as permanent settlers a sufficient number of our own people. Being
a practical Nation we have never tried to force on any section 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 a century has elapsed—although doubtless it
soon will be. In each case we showed the practical governmental
genius of our race by devising methods suitable to meet the actual
existing needs; not by insisting upon the application of some abstract
shibboleth to all our new possessions alike, no matter how incongruous
this application might sometimes be.
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 its
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 its share in shaping 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. It seems to us
a mere matter of course, a matter of elementary right and justice,
that in the deliberations of the national representative bodies the
representatives of a State which came into the Union but yesterday
stand on a footing of exact and entire equality with those of the
Commonwealths whose sons once signed the Declaration of Independence.
But this way of looking at the matter is purely modern, and in its
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 dependencies, 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 expansion and self-government, and
now the world accepts it as the natural process, as the rule; but
a century and a quarter ago it was not merely exceptional; it was
unknown.
This, then, is the great historical significance of the movement of
continental expansion in which the Louisiana Purchase was the most
striking single achievement. It stands out in marked relief even among
the feats of a nation of pioneers, a nation whose people have from
the beginning been picked out by process of natural selection from
among the most enterprising individuals of the nations of western
Europe. The acquisition of the territory is a credit to the broad
and far-sighted statesmanship of the great statesmen to whom it was
immediately due, and above all to the aggressive and the masterful
character of the hardy pioneer folk to whose restless energy these
statesmen gave expression and direction, whom they followed rather
than led. The history of the land comprised within the limits of the
Purchase is the epitome of the entire history of our people. Within
these limits we have gradually built up State after State until now
they many times surpass in wealth, in population, and in many-sided
development, the original thirteen States as they were when their
delegates met in the Continental Congress. The people of these States
have shown themselves mighty in war with their fellow-man, and mighty
in strength to tame the rugged wilderness. They could not thus have
conquered the forest and the prairie, the mountain and the desert,
had they not possessed the great fighting virtues, the qualities
which enable a people to overcome the forces of hostile men and
hostile nature. On the other hand, they could not have used aright
their conquest had they not in addition possessed the qualities of
self-mastery and self-restraint, the power of acting in combination
with their fellows, the power of yielding obedience to the law and
of building up an orderly civilization. Courage and hardihood are
indispensable virtues in a people; but the people which possesses no
others can never rise high in the scale either of power or of culture.
Great peoples must have in addition the governmental capacity which
comes only when individuals fully recognize their duties to one
another and to the whole body politic, and are able to join together
in feats of constructive statesmanship and of honest and effective
administration.
The old pioneer days are gone, with their roughness and their
hardship, their incredible toil and their wild half-savage romance.
But the need for the pioneer virtues remains the same as ever. The
peculiar frontier conditions have vanished; but the manliness and
stalwart hardihood of the frontiersmen can be given even freer scope
under the conditions surrounding the complex industrialism of the
present day. In this great region acquired for our people under the
Presidency of Jefferson, this region stretching from the Gulf to the
Canadian border, from the Mississippi to the Rockies, the material and
social progress has been so vast that alike for weal and for woe its
people now share the opportunities and bear the burdens common to the
entire civilized world. The problems before us are fundamentally the
same east and west of the Mississippi, in the new States and in the
old, and exactly the same qualities are required for their successful
solution.
We meet here to-day to commemorate a great event, an event which marks
an era in statesmanship no less than in pioneering. It is fitting that
we should pay our homage in words; but we must in honor make our words
good by deeds. We have every right to take a just pride in the great
deeds of our forefathers; but we show ourselves unworthy to be their
descendants if we make what they did an excuse for our lying supine
instead of an incentive to the effort to show ourselves by our acts
worthy of them. In the administration of city, State, and Nation,
in the management of our home life and the conduct of our business
and social relations, we are bound to show certain high and fine
qualities of character under penalty of seeing the whole heart of our
civilization eaten out while the body still lives.
We justly pride ourselves on our marvelous material prosperity, and
such prosperity must exist in order to establish a foundation upon
which a higher life can be built; but unless we do in very fact build
this higher life thereon, the material prosperity itself will go for
but very little. Now, in 1903, in the altered conditions, we must meet
the changed and changing problems with the spirit shown by the men who
in 1803 and in the subsequent years gained, explored, conquered, and
settled this vast territory, then a desert, now filled with thriving
and populous States.
The old days were great because the men who lived in them had mighty
qualities; and we must make the new days great by showing these same
qualities. We must insist upon courage and resolution, upon hardihood,
tenacity, and fertility in resource; we must insist upon the strong,
virile virtues; and we must insist no less upon the virtues of
self-restraint, self-mastery, regard for the rights of others; we must
show our abhorrence of cruelty, brutality, and corruption, in public
and in private life alike. If we come short in any of these qualities
we shall measurably fail; and if, as I believe we surely shall, we
develop these qualities in the future to an even greater degree than
in the past, then in the century now beginning we shall make of this
Republic the freest and most orderly, the most just and most mighty,
nation which has ever come forth from the womb of time.