more urgently need our lumber and our water power and our outlook upon the Pacific; and to whom do the American people owe the possession of these incomparable and growing boons but to Lewis and Clark and to the pioneers to whom Lewis and Clark pointed the way. Governor Chamberlain was right the other night when at Boise he spoke of the Lewis and Clark expedition as Jefferson's greatest act. Alongside the two inscriptions on Jefferson's monument selected by him, namely, that he was the author of the Declaration of Independence and that he was the founder of the University of Virginia, posterity will fain inscribe the fact that he was the promoter and organizer of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
The observance of the Lewis and Clark Centennial, therefore, is an occasion in which the American people as a whole and through their government have the largest reasons for generous participation. For great was the Oregon opportunity to the nation and the Lewis and Clark expedition was the key that opened it. All honor from the nation at large is due to those who made this national opportunity and seized it. The possession of the Pacific coast was the corollary and sequel to the Oregon movement; but the Oregon movement itself was corollary to nothing less than the spirit and vigor of the American people and their foothold upon this continent.
We have, then, a national occasion second only to that of Philadelphia in 1876; and the first great mission of the centennial will be realized when its occasion has been so interpreted and enforced that a hearty and liberal participation in the celebration on the part of the nation has been secured so that our American national consciousness may fully realize what has been "the course of empire" with us as a nation and what it is almost certain to be in the future.
The accomplishment of the other mission of the exposition
