Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission

by Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission

The beautiful picture whose outlines you now behold will, to adopt the simile of the chief designer, when completed, compose a song that will reverberate around the globe.

And now, Mr. President, it is my pleasing privilege and high honor to present to you for dedication the buildings of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. May a high standard of citizenship and broader humanity and the mission of the country whose worthy representative you are be sustained and fostered and promoted by the uses to which these structures are devoted. May the happiness of mankind be advanced and broadened by the lofty purposes that inspired this undertaking and moved our own and sister countries to unite in its accomplishment.

Fifth. Dedication address by the President of the United States:

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 wildness 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, N. Mex.—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 Clark 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.