from the
East. We may not be so thoroughly convinced of this after we have
heard the response to the next regular toast, 'The Pilgrim in the
West.' I beg to introduce Mr. Edward O. Wolcott, of Colorado."]

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:--It was with great diffidence that
I accepted the invitation of your President to respond to a toast
to-night. I realized my incapacity to do justice to the occasion, while
at the same time I recognized the high compliment conveyed. I felt
somewhat as the man did respecting the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy; he
said he didn't know whether Lord Bacon wrote Shakespeare's works or not,
but if he didn't, he missed the greatest opportunity of his life.
[Laughter.]

The West is only a larger, and in some respects a better, New England. I
speak not of those rose gardens of culture, Missouri and Arkansas, but
otherwise, generally of the States and Territories west of the
Mississippi, and more particularly, because more advisedly, of Colorado,
the youngest and most rugged of the-thirty-eight; almost as large in
area as all New England and New York combined; "with room about her
hearth for all mankind"; with fertile valleys, and with mines so rich
and so plentiful that we occasionally, though reluctantly, dispose of
one to our New York friends. [Laughter.] We have no very rich, no very
poor, and no almshouses; and in the few localities where we are not good
enough, New England Home Missionary Societies are rapidly bringing us
up to the Plymouth Rock standard and making us face the Heavenly music.
[Laughter.] We take annually from our granite hills wealth enough to pay
for the fertilizers your Eastern and Southern soils require to save them
from impoverishment. We have added three hundred millions to the coinage
of the world; and, although you call only for gold, we generously give
you silver, too. [Laughter.] You are not always inclined to appreciate
our efforts to swell the circulation, but none the less are we one with
you in patriotic desire to see the revenues reformed, provided always
that our own peculiar industries are not affected. Our mountains slope
toward either sea, and in their shadowy depths we find not only hidden
wealth, but inspiration and incentive to high thought and noble living,
for Freedom has ever sought the recesses of the mountains for her
stronghold, and her spirit hovers there; their snowy summits and the
long, rolling plains are lightened all day long by