s
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
mater