University of Virginia Library

XXV
AT THE DEDICATION CEREMONIES OF THE
LOUISIANA PURCHASE EXPOSITION, ST.
LOUIS, MISSOURI, 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,
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 Fé—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 Clarke 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 upon the waters,
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 well-nigh 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 of 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 historic 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 a 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 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 an epitome of the
entire history of our people. Within these limits we
have gradually built up State after State until now they
many times over-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 marvellous 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.