AT SAN BERNARDINO, CAL., MAY 7, 1903
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.