Oregon's day, however, is dawning again. America's surplus energy is no longer absorbed in gold mining in California, in occupying the plains of Kansas, Nebraska, or the Dakotas. The overloaded passenger trains to the Pacific Northwest tell unmistakably the nation's need of this region. It needs our farm lands. It will more and more urgently need our lumber and our water power and our outlook upon the Pacific; and to whom do the American people owe the possession of these incomparable and growing boons but to Lewis and Clark and to the pioneers to whom Lewis and Clark pointed the way. Governor Chamberlain was right the other night when at Boise he spoke of the Lewis and Clark expedition as Jefferson's greatest act. Alongside the two inscriptions on Jefferson's monument selected by him, namely, that he was the author of the Declaration of Independence and that he was the founder of the University of Virginia, posterity will fain inscribe the fact that he was the promoter and organizer of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
The observance of the Lewis and Clark Centennial, therefore, is an occasion in which the American people as a whole and through their government have the largest reasons for generous participation. For great was the Oregon opportunity to the nation and the Lewis and Clark expedition was the key that opened it. All honor from the nation at large is due to those who made this national opportunity and seized it. The possession of the Pacific coast was the corollary and sequel to the Oregon movement; but the Oregon movement itself was corollary to nothing less than the spirit and vigor of the American people and their foothold upon this continent.
We have, then, a national occasion second only to that of Philadelphia in 1876; and the first great mission of the centennial will be realized when its occasion has been so interpreted and enforced that a hearty and liberal participation in the celebration on the part of the nation has been secured so that our American national consciousness may fully realize what has been "the course of empire" with us as a nation and what it is almost certain to be in the future.
The accomplishment of the other mission of the exposition requires a true interpretation of the problem of largest progress for the Pacific Northwest. Expositions worthy of the name can not be "hit or miss" affairs. They are not mere congeries of remarkable products. An exposition should have an organic unity and a distinct aim. Its aim must bear directly on the highest interests of the supporting community. There are peculiar reasons for the exercise of the highest degree of care and insight in the organization of the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition. No people ever before invested so heavily in proportion to their means as Portland and Oregon propose to invest in the Lewis and Clark Centennial. No exposition was ever held in a community so plastic, so completely in the making as are Portland and Oregon. The current of common thought and effort is so strongly set toward the Lewis and Clark Centennial that the very cast of Oregon's civilization in the future will surely come from what is realized in that event. The exposition will leave an inspired, unified, and enlightened people, with ideals newly defined and elevated; or it will be followed by more or less of humiliation, factional strife, disgrace, blighting discouragement, with sordid ideals and disordered social relations.
Most auspicious was Oregon's response to the idea of a celebration. Stronger faith in the good that may come from unity in action toward higher things no other people has ever shown; and why should not Oregon have faith in greater things for herself and the Pacific Northwest? The Pacific Northwest bears almost exactly the same relation to the rest of the nation east of us geographically, historically, and economically that Greece bore to the Orient, and that England bore to the continental nations of Europe.
I take it, then, that the normal attitude towards the exposition project is one that regards it as a serious undertaking, having tremendous possibilities for making or marring much in the future of Oregon. The exposition comes when Oregon is just at the flood tide of new opportunities—opportunities that require twentieth century enlightenment on the part of the masses if these opportunities are to yield anything like unmixed good. Just as the Lewis and Clark expedition was the key that opened the Oregon opportunity to the nation so is the Lewis and Clark Centennial admirably adapted to become the key to open the way to the highest development of industrial democracy in the Pacific Northwest and to realize its leadership in social progress on this continent. We have, I think, a fine example given us by the authorities of Louisiana Purchase Exposition of how to plan definitely an exposition to accomplish a great purpose. The main idea with them is to make a world's fair for the first time represent the world in epitome as a "going concern." They thus express their main purpose: "As to the lesson for the world, the Directorate desire to make a leading point. It is to show life and movement. * * An attempt will be made to put the world before the eye of the visitor, each exhibit being so displayed as to make plain its story, its purpose, and its aim." And again: "The Department of Education is made the first department of the classification in accordance with the theory upon which the entire exposition is founded. * * * Through education man comes to a knowledge of his powers, and of the possibilities of life, and upon it are dependent the processes which extend throughout all the fields of industry. This correlation of the powers of the brain and of the hand of man, extending throughout the entire exhibit scheme of the exposition, will, for the first time in the history of expositions, afford a strictly scientific basis for the collection and classification of objects." And finally: "At Saint Louis, the prevailing characteristic, it is intended, shall be life and motion, and the installation of products and processes in juxtaposition. The classification is based upon this plan, and its effects upon the proportions of the buildings is noticeable in that Machinery Hall is relatively so small in area. The machines through whose operation raw material is converted into use and the processes employed in utilizing natural products will be exhibited, so that not only will the fund of human information be greatly increased, but suggestion will be made to students, scientists, and inventors that will give still greater development to genius in the following than in the preceding decade."
The World's Fair, in this carefully planned purpose, affords a fine model for the Lewis and Clark Exposition. But Portland is not simply to do for the Pacific Northwest and the other peoples in close economic and commercial relations with it what Saint Louis aspires to do for the world. Saint Louis undertakes what was distinctively the nineteenth century problem—that of mastery by man of the physical forces of the world and of more nearly perfect adjustment to his natural environment. The Louisiana Purchase Exposition, with its World Congress of the Arts and Sciences, and all of its exhibits arranged to promote the development of invention and the application of scientific methods to industry, has a great mission; and yet the peculiar field which belongs to the Lewis and Clark Exposition gives it, if not a greater mission, at least one more advanced—if you please a twentieth century mission. Man in the Pacific Northwest has a peculiar problem. All the science and art of the past are his legacy. They fairly press in upon him in their appeal to him for utilization here. Man here has a physical environment so rich and so diversified as not only to invite the largest application of science and art, but also one that demands the highest organization of associated effort. In other words, the Pacific Northwest places man in such relation to history, to nature, and to his fellow-man, as to promise him here, if his inheritance is not sold for a mess of pottage, man's highest development. It rests with the Lewis and Clark Exposition to rise to the occasion. For it represents a first possible step in a grand cooperative effort to develop a social environment here commensurate with what nature has done for us. If for a ruthless, wasteful course of social evolution that would never reach any desirable goal we would realize one of steady, frictionless progress, with opportunities of fullest life open to all, we must make the Lewis and Clark Centennial fulfill its high mission. If the people of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest do not persist in their determination to make this concerted effort toward the inauguration of the highest policies of social progress here it is hard to see what occasion can bring them so near this mood again. It is the spell that the commemoration of a great event and a great movement casts over them that will hardly be repeated. The Lewis and Clark Centennial then is the flood tide of opportunity. If it is not seized and we lapse again into mere individualistic policies "all the voyage" of life in the future of the Pacific Northwest will be bound in comparative "shallows and in miseries."
An exposition planned to meet the twentieth century needs becomes the herald of an industrial democracy in which there is a completely harmonious cooperation for the realization of the highest social ideals. It is dawning upon us that publicity is the first condition of relief from the trust evil. We need yet, however, to realize that essential publicity or light is the talisman for developing a true democratic spirit to which are disclosed ever expanding vistas of possibilities. The first great duty of the exposition authorities is to bring to the people of the Pacific Northwest the largest enlightenment on the natural resources of this region. Taking our timber resources as an illustration, we are painfully aware that the timber holdings are not as widely and equably distributed among the masses as one could wish; but we have many rich natural monopolies which the whole people should share. They have common and incalculable permanent interests in the forests of Oregon, in the water power of our streams, in our facilities for irrigation, in the mines, and in the ensemble of natural beauty here. Shall the great natural forest areas in Oregon which may become the source of an ever increasing flow of wealth for all time for the whole people be allowed, without state forestry activity, to become mere waste places for weed trees? We are told by Mr. Elwood Mead, Chief of the Division of Irrigation, that he believes Oregon "has the largest area of unimproved land whereon irrigation is possible of any State in the Union." Here is a great interest in which most fortunately a policy of coöperation between the state and the nation has been instituted. What could be more propitious for the good fortune of the people than an active coöperation between the authorities of the exposition and the United States bureaus of forestry, irrigation, and the United States geological survey in preparing an exhibit of the data on the interests of the people of the State in these natural resources? With such definite, earnest, and laudable purposes in view, Congress and the Administration would respond to the claims of the Lewis and Clark Exposition in a very different spirit from that with which they have met recent expositions.
By means of models, relief maps, photographs, drawings, charts, and graphic representations generally, along with congresses and the discussions by the press, the people, and their legislators, would come to take an intelligent and far-sighted view of these great inheritances of theirs. A whole summer given to the exposition of the people's interests in their common heritage, with the use of the best art of illustration, representation, and elucidation, would awaken a living interest so that they would make sure of their rights, conserve an equality of opportunities and make our natural resources yield their highest social utility. Our experience with our state school lands shows that such a fortunate condition is absolutely impossible without the influence an exposition could exert toward an enlightenment on our public inheritances.
The Municipal Exposition at Dresden, Germany, during this summer, gives a suggestion for a municipal department for our exposition that would work a transformation in our civic spirit and enlightenment. How glorious it would be for Oregon if the Lewis and Clark Fair Clubs would in dead earnest determine to possess themselves of the philosophy of city making, and to do their best to control municipal activity in Oregon so as to make it conserve highest economic and æsthetic ends and bring about rational unity in all municipal development and foster an architectural spirit. Why not commission a delegate to Dresden? Why not begin to make wholesome, beautiful, and edifying the Oregon village and city, so that, as a whole, each may be a positive joy forever? The same strenuous idealism would find a rich field in the affairs of our counties and of our school districts. The Oregon farm must come in for as many meliorating influences as the Oregon town. All that good roads, graded schools, traveling libraries, neighborhood telephones, and model farm establishments can do to elevate the social conditions of farm life will be greatly furthered by the exposition; but the problem that is fundamental with the people, both of the town and of the country, pertains not merely to sharing the unearned increment of the natural and artificial monopolies, but also to participation in the gains of all capitalized industry. It is the problem of "peopleizing" the industries. Corporate organization and management should be a department of the exposition. By the elimination of all the unnecessary risk in investments in corporation securities through effective governmental regulation and supervision the people may gain control and reap the large profits of capitalized industry. The exposition will have its highest mission in securing to the people an interest in the gains and a share in the control of our industrial organizations.