had joined the grand movement.  Early in the forties a South Carolinian captain of engineers, the Pathfinder, John C. Fremont, had marked the way to the far West coast, and added a new realm to the National domain. [Applause.] It was the domain soon famed for its delightful climate, its wealth of resources, and its combination of every natural advantage that human life desires.  The gleaming gold soon after found in the sands of Sutter’s Fort spread its fame afar and attracted to it the superb band of men who came from every State to lay firm and sure the foundation of the new commonwealth.

There were only fourteen Southerners in the Constitutional Convention at Monterey, but their genius for government made them a fair working majority in the body of forty-eight members.  Not content with building a grand State like this, the united army gathered from the North and South alike turned its face toward the desert and fastnesses of the eternal hills and “continuous woods where rolls the Oregon and hears no sound save his own dashings,” and pitched their tents, rolled back the awful silence that through ages had reigned there; and learned the secrets that desolation guarded, alluring to them from their fastnesses a renewed stream of treasure which has resulted in making us the envy of all other nations.

In conspicuous contrast to the attitude and sentiment of the South, the East has never followed to encourage nor sympathize with the West.  Whether it be in legislation or politics or finance, the Western idea has ever failed to command the earnest attention to which it is entitled.  There is a sentiment which is growing more general and vigorous every day in the far West, that the time is near at hand when it will decline to adhere to the fortunes of any leader or body which recklessly ignores its claims or persistently refuses to it recognition.  It is a very significant fact, Mr. President, that this great region, containing one-fourth of the National area, one-seventeenth of the population, and constituting one-seventh of the whole number of States has had up to this time, but one member of the Cabinet.  In the present Cabinet, fourteen States (east of the Mississippi and North of the old Mason and Dixon’s Line) have seven members and the remaining thirty States have but one.  Those thirty States will see to it in the future that the party which succeeds through their support has its representation their efforts have deserved.

I cannot close, Mr. President, without giving expression to a sentiment to which Southerners in the West are peculiarly alive—­the sentiment of sympathy and fraternity which exists between the South and the West. [Applause.] The course of historical development which I have outlined of the Western man has wrought a bond of friendship between them, and that bond is not a reminiscence, but a living, vital, and efficient fact.  Only but yesterday, politicians, thank God not the people, sought for selfish ends to cast back the South into Stygian gloom from which she had slowly and laboriously but gloriously emerged, to forge upon her again hope-killing shackles of a barbarous rule.  In that hour of trial which you and I, sir, know to have been a menace and a reality to whom did she turn for succor?  To this man of the West, and quick and glorious was the response.