It is this element of unshakable strength to which we are apt specially to refer when we praise a man in the simplest and most effective way, by praising him as a man.

It is the one quality which we can least afford to lose.

Every man who does his duty as a soldier, as a statesman, or as a private citizen is paying to Grant’s memory the kind of homage that is best worth paying.

In short, the Roman had character as well as masterful genius, and when pitted against peoples either of less genius or of less character, these peoples went down.

When these crises come, the nation will triumph or sink accordingly as it produces or fails to produce statesmen like Lincoln and soldiers like Grant, and accordingly as it does or does not back them in their efforts.

As I have already said, our first duty, our most important work, is setting our own house in order.

As a nation we shall have to choose our representatives in these islands as carefully as Grant chose the generals who were to serve at the vital points under him.

Certain duties have fallen to us as a legacy of the war with Spain, and we can not avoid performing them.

All about us there are innumerable tendencies that tell for good, and innumerable tendencies that tell for evil.

There are certain things so obvious as to seem commonplace, which, nevertheless, must be kept constantly before us if we are to preserve our just sense of proportion.

These are the goals toward which we strive; and let us at least earnestly endeavor to realize them here on this continent.

In our eager, restless life of effort but little can be done by that cloistered virtue of which Milton spoke with such fine contempt.

If we can ensure the prosperity of these two classes we need not trouble ourselves about the prosperity of the rest, for that will follow as a matter of course.

Yet it is equally true that, while this power should exist, it should be used sparingly and with self-restraint.

This is a task for which we need the finest abilities of the statesman, the student, the patriot, and the far-seeing lover of mankind.

It is our own success here in America that has brought about the complete alteration in feeling.

More extraordinary still, even after independence was achieved, and a firm Union accomplished under that wonderful document, the Constitution adopted in 1789, we still see traces of the same feeling lingering here and there in our own…

Grave Senators and Representatives expressed dire foreboding as to the ruin which would result from admitting the communities growing up along the Ohio to a full equality with the older States; and when Louisiana was given Statehood, they…

When our people had began to settle in the Mississippi Valley, Jefferson himself accepted with equanimity the view that probably it would not be possible to keep regions so infinitely remote as the Mississippi and the Atlantic Coast in the…

As Lowell finely said, on this continent we have made new States as Old World men pitch tents.

Even the most far-seeing statesmen, those most gifted with the imagination needed by really great statesmen, could not at first grasp what the process really meant.

All the great colonizing powers, England, France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, and Russia, managed their colonies primarily in the interest of the home country.

And of all this marvelous history perhaps the most wonderful portion is that which deals with the way in which the Pacific Coast and the Rocky Mountains were settled.

You and your fathers who built up the West did more even than you thought; for you shaped thereby the destiny of the whole Republic, and as a necessary corollary profoundly influenced the course of events throughout the world.

More and more as the years go by this Republic will find its guidance in the thought and action of the West, because the conditions of development in the West have steadily tended to accentuate the peculiarly American characteristics of…