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 the sunshine, and we are not only Colorado, but Colorado Claro! [Applause.]

Practically, as little is known of the great West by you of the East as was known a century ago of New England by our British cousins.  Your interest in us is, unfortunately, largely the interest on our mortgages, your attitude toward us is somewhat critical, and the New England heart is rarely aroused respecting the West except when some noble Indian, after painting himself and everything else within his reach red, is sent to his happy hunting grounds. [Laughter.] Yet, toward the savage, as in all things, do not blame us if we follow the Christian example set us by our forefathers.  We read that the Court at Plymouth, more than fifty years after the colony was founded, ordered “That whosoever shall shoot off any gun on any unnecessary occasion, or at any game whatsoever, except an Indian or a wolf, shall forfeit five shillings for every such shot”; and our pious ancestors popped over many an Indian on their way to Divine worship. [Laughter.] But when in Colorado, settled less than a generation ago, the old New England heredity works itself out and an occasional Indian is peppered, the East raises its hands in horror, and our offending cowboys could not find admittance even to an Andover Probation Society. [Laughter.]