Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission

by Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission

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 commonwealth 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 colonists not as a self-governing equal, but as a subject.

The process which we began has since been followed by all the great people 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, 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 possess 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 frontiersman 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, the people 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 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.