Mr. Mayor and Fellow-citizens—This is another of those bright and beautiful pictures that have been spread before our eyes on this whole journey from Washington. I am glad to stop for a moment in this enterprising and prosperous city. I am glad to know that you are adding manufacturing to your agriculture, and that you are weaving some of the abundance of wool that is furnished by your flocks. It is the perfection of society, commercially, when you find immediately at your own doors a market for those things that you have to sell. You are a long way from the seaboard. The transportation companies, however fair their rates may be, must levy very heavy tolls upon your produce for taking it to the Atlantic or to the Pacific. It is then a pleasing thing when, instead of sending your wool to some distant city to be woven into cloth, you can do that work yourselves as you develop, bringing in these manufacturing industries whose employees consume the products of your farm and in turn give to the farmer that which he and his children have to wear. You are approaching the most independent commercial condition. When every farmer is able to sell from his own wagon everything he produces and is emancipated from transportation tolls, he is independent and prosperous.
I am glad to see these dear children here coming from the free schools of your city. The public school is a most wholesome and hopeful institution. It has an assimilative power possessed by no other institution in our country. Where the children of rich and poor mingle together on the play-ground and in the school-room, there is produced a unity of feeling and a popular love for public institutions that can be brought about in no other way. [Cheers.] God bless and promote your public schools until every child in your Territory shall be gathered into them. [Cheers.]
[AMERICAN FORK, UTAH, MAY 9.]
Early in the afternoon a brief stop was made at American Fork, where several hundred children were marshalled under Bishop George Halliday (Mormon) and Rev. F. G. Webster. The Reception Committee consisted of Mayor George Cunningham, James Chipman, John J. Cushing, and John F. Pribyl.
The President, addressing the school children, said:
I want to express my interest in these dear children who have gathered here. It is very pleasant to have at all these little stations these expressions of your good-will. I rejoice to see the development which has taken place in these regions since I was here a few years ago, and I have no doubt that it will go on until all your valleys are prosperous and full of happy homes. [Cheers.]