_Mr. Governor, Mr. Mayor, Ladies and Gentlemen_:
It is of course with a peculiar feeling of pleasure that I come here
to New Mexico, from which Territory half (and if my memory serves me
correctly a little over half) of the men of my regiment came. The man
is but a poor man wherever he may be born to whom one part of this
country is not exactly as dear as any other part. And I should count
myself wholly unworthy of the position I hold if I did not strive to
represent the people of the mountains and the plains exactly as much
as those of the Mississippi Valley or of either coast, the Atlantic
or the Pacific. I know your people, Mr. Governor, and I need not say
how fond I am of them, for that you know yourself. How could I help
being fond of people with whom I have worked, with whom I marched to
battle? The only men here to whom I would doff my hat quicker than to
the men of my own regiment are the men of the great war. You know well
the claim that comradeship in war makes between man and man; and it
has always seemed to me, Mr. Governor, that in a sense my regiment in
its composition was a typical American regiment. Its people came from
the West chiefly, but some from the East, from the South chiefly, but
some from the North, so that every section was represented in it. They
varied in birthplace as in creed; some were born on this side of the
water, some on the other side; some of their ancestors had come to New
Mexico, as did your ancestors, Mr. Governor, when this was already a
city and at a time when not one English-speaking community existed on
the Atlantic seaboard; some were men whose forefathers were among the
early Puritans and Pilgrims; some were of those whose forefathers had
settled by the banks of the James even before the Puritan and Pilgrim
came to this country, but after your people came. There were men in
that regiment who themselves were born, or whose parents were born, in
England, Ireland, Germany, or Scandinavia, but there was not a man,
no matter what his creed, what his birthplace, what his ancestry, who
was not an American and nothing else. We had representatives of the
real, original, native Americans, because we had no inconsiderable
number who were in whole or in part of Indian blood. There was in the
regiment but one kind of rivalry among those men, and but one would
have been tolerated. That was the rivalry of each man to see if he
could not do his duty a little better than any one else. Short would
have been the shrift of any man who tried to introduce division along
lines of section, or creed, or class. We had serving in the ranks
men of inherited wealth and men who all their lives had earned each
day’s bread by that day’s labor, and they stood on a footing of exact
equality. It would not have been any more possible for a feeling of
arrogance to exist on one side than for a feeling of rancor and envy
to exist on the other.
I appreciate to the full all the difficulties under which you labor,
and I think that your progress has been astonishing. I congratulate
you upon all that has been done, and I am certain that the future will
far more than make good the past. I believe that we have come upon
an era of fuller development for New Mexico. That development must
of course take place principally through the average of foresight,
thrift, industry, energy and will of the citizens of New Mexico; but
the government can and will help somewhat. This is a great grazing
State. Because of the importance of the grazing industry I wish to
bespeak your support for the preservation in proper shape of the
forest reserves of the State. These forest reserves are created
and are kept up in the interest of the home-maker. In many of them
there is much natural pasturage. Where that is the case the object
is to have that pasturage used by the settlers, by the people of the
Territory, not eaten out so that nobody will have the benefit after
three years. I want the land preserved so that the pasturage will do,
not merely for a man who wants to make a good thing out of it for two
or three years, but for the man who wishes to see it preserved for the
use of his children and his children’s children. That is the way to
use the resources of the land. I build no small hope upon the aid that
under the wise law of Congress will ultimately be extended to this
as to other States and Territories in the way of governmental aid to
irrigation. Irrigation is of course to be in the future wellnigh the
most potent factor in the agricultural development of this Territory
and one of the factors which will do most toward bringing it up to
Statehood. Nothing will count more than development of that kind in
bringing the Territory in as a State. That is the kind of development
which I am most anxious to see here—the development that means
permanent growth in the capacity of the land, not temporary, not the
exploiting of the land for a year or two at the cost of its future
impoverishment, but the building up of farm and ranch in such shape as
to benefit the home-maker whose intention it is that this Territory of
the present, this State of the future, shall be a great State in the
American Union.