37 2 Presidential Addresses 



I believe in you. I am glad to see you. I wish 

 you well with all my heart, and I know that your 

 future will justify all the hopes we have. 



AT BARSTOW, CALIFORNIA, MAY 7, 1903 



My -Fellow-Citizens: 



This is the first time I have ever been to Cali 

 fornia, and I can not say to you how much I have 

 looked forward to making the trip. I can tell you 

 now with absolute certainty that I will have en 

 joyed it to the full when I get through. 



I have felt that the events of the last five or six 

 years have been steadily hastening the day when the 

 Pacific will loom in the world's commerce as the 

 Atlantic now looms, and I have wished greatly to see 

 these marvelous communities growing up on the 

 Pacific Slope. There are plenty of things that to you 

 seem matters of course, that I have read about and 

 know about from reading, and yet when I see them 

 they strike me as very wonderful. 



One thing that impresses me more than anything 

 else as I go through the country as I said I have 

 never been on the Pacific Slope; the Rocky Moun 

 tain States and the States of the great plains I know 

 quite as well as I know the Eastern seaboard ; I have 

 worked with the men, played with them, fought with 

 them; I know them all through the thing that 

 impresses me most as I go through this country and 

 meet the men and women of the country, is the es 

 sential unity of all Americans. Down at bottom we 



