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 with out 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 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 today 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 today 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.
From the American Memory Collection, Library
of Congress.
