_My Fellow-Citizens_:
This is the first time I have ever been to California, and I can not
say to you how much I have looked forward to making the trip. I can
tell you now with absolute certainty that I will have enjoyed it to
the full when I get through.
I have felt that the events of the last five or six years have been
steadily hastening the day when the Pacific will loom in the world’s
commerce as the Atlantic now looms, and I have wished greatly to see
these marvelous communities growing up on the Pacific Slope. There are
plenty of things that to you seem matters of course, that I have read
about and know about from reading, and yet when I see them they strike
me as very wonderful.
One thing that impresses me more than anything else as I go through
the country—as I said I have never been on the Pacific Slope; the
Rocky Mountain States and the States of the great plains I know quite
as well as I know the Eastern seaboard; I have worked with the men,
played with them, fought with them; I know them all through—the thing
that impresses me most as I go through this country and meet the men
and women of the country, is the essential unity of all Americans.
Down at bottom we are the same people all through. That is not merely
a unity of section, it is a unity of class. For my good fortune I
have been thrown into intimate relationship, into intimate personal
friendship, with many men of many different occupations, and my faith
is firm that we shall come unscathed out of all our difficulties here
in America, because I think that the average American is a decent
fellow, and that the prime thing in getting him to get on well with
the other average American is to have each remember that the other is
a decent fellow, and try to look at the problems a little from the
other’s standpoint.
I thank you for coming out here to greet me. I wish you well with all
my heart for the future.