_Mr. Chairman, Mr. Governor, and you, my Fellow-Citizens_:
It is half a century since the early pioneers founded this place, and
while time goes fast in America anywhere, it has gone fastest here on
the Pacific Slope and in the regions of the Rocky Mountains directly
to the eastward. If you live in the presence of miracles you gradually
get accustomed to them. So it is difficult for any of us, and it is
especially difficult for those who have themselves been doing the
things, to realize the absolute wonder of the things that have been
done. California and the region round about have in the past fifty or
sixty years traversed the distance that separates the founders of
the civilization of Mesopotamia and Egypt from those who enjoy the
civilization of to-day. They have gone further than that. They have
seen this country change from a wilderness into one of the most highly
civilized regions of the world’s surface. They have seen cities,
farms, ranches, railroads grow up and transform the very face of
nature. The changes have been so stupendous that in our eyes they have
become commonplace. We fail to realize their immense, their tremendous
importance. We fail entirely to realize what they mean. Only the older
among you can remember the early pioneer days, and yet to-day I have
spoken to man after man yet in his prime who, when he first came to
this country warred against wild man and wild nature in the way in
which that warfare was waged in the prehistoric days of the old world.
We have spanned in a single lifetime—in less than the lifetime of any
man who reaches the age limit prescribed by the psalmist—the whole
space from savagery through barbarism, through semi-civilization, to
the civilization that stands two thousand years ahead of that of Rome
and Greece in the days of their prime.
The old pioneer days have gone, but if we are to prove ourselves
worthy sons of our sires we can not afford to let the old pioneer
virtues lapse. There is just the same need now that there was in
’49 for the qualities that mark a mighty and masterful people. East
and west we now face substantially the same problems. No people can
advance as far and as fast as we have advanced, no people can make
such progress as we have made, and expect to escape the penalties that
go with such speed and progress. The growth and complexity of our
civilization, the intensity of the movement of modern life, have meant
that with the benefits have come certain disadvantages and certain
perils. A great industrial civilization can not be built up without a
certain dislocation, a certain disarrangement of the old conditions,
and therefore the springing up of new problems. The problems are new,
but the qualities needed to solve them are as old as history itself,
and we shall solve them aright only on condition that we bring to the
solution the same qualities of head and heart that have been brought
to the solution of similar problems by every race that has ever
conquered for itself a space in the annals of time.