d I turn with confidence
to 'The Southerner of the Pacific Slope,' and invite Mr. Hugh C.
Wallace, of the State of Washington, to respond."]

MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--For more than one hundred years
upon this continent a silent army has been marching from the East toward
the West. No silken banners have waved above it, and no blare of trumpet
or beat of drum has heralded its progress. And yet its conquests have
been grander than those of Peru or Mexico, its victories more glorious
than those of Marengo, of Friedland, or of Austerlitz. It has subdued an
empire richer than the Indies without inflicting the cruelties of Clive,
or the exactions of Hastings, and that empire is to-day, Mr. President,
a part of your heritage and mine. [Applause.] For more than thirty years
past the region in which most of those I see around me first saw the
light has lain prostrate, borne down by a Titanic struggle whose
blighting force fell wholly upon her. For more than a generation her
enterprise has seemed exhausted, her strength wasted, and her glory
departed. And yet she has not failed to furnish her full quota to the
grand army of conquest to carry to completion the great work which
Boone, Crockett, and Houston, all her sons--began, and which her genius
alone made possible. [Applause.]

Turn back with me the pages of time to the beginning of this imposing
march and glance for a moment at its resplendent progress. Its beginning
was in Virginia. Virginians led by that first of Southerners whose natal
day we celebrate to-night and whose fame grows brighter in the
lengthening perspective of the years, conquered the savage and his
little less than savage European ally, and saved for the Nation then
unborn the whole Northwest. The Pinckneys, the Rutledges, and the
Gwinetts forced the hand of Spain from the throat of the Mississippi,
and left the current of trade free to flow to the Gulf unvexed by
foreign influence.

Another Virginian, illustrious through all time as the great vindicator
of humanity, doubled the area of the national possession of his time by
the Louisiana purchase, and Lewis and Clarke, both sons of the Old
Dominion, in 1804 first trod the vast uninhabited wilds of the far
Northwest to find a land richer in all the precious products of the East
than mortal eyes had yet beheld. So were our borders extended from the
Gulf and the Rio Grande to the 49th parallel and from the Atlantic to
the Pacific--but for Sou