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