424 Presidential Addresses 



The immediate cause of the great development of 

 Alaska of course is to be found in its mines; but 

 most of the people of this country are wholly in 

 error when they think of the mines as being the 

 sole or even the chief permanent cause of Alaska's 

 future greatness. Alaska has great possibilities of 

 agricultural and pastoral development. Not only her 

 mines, her fisheries, her forests, but her agriculture 

 and her stock-raising will combine to make Alaska 

 one of the great wealth-producing portions of our 

 Republic. I am anxious that our laws should be 

 framed in the interest of those who intend to go 

 there and stay there and bring up their children 

 there and make it in very fact as well as in name an 

 integral part of this Republic. I ask your help and 

 pledge you my help in the effort to secure such leg- 

 islation. In the case of the mine you get the metal 

 out of the earth, you can not leave any metal in 

 there to produce other metal ; but in the case of the 

 salmon fishery, if you are wise you will insist upon 

 its being carried on under conditions which will 

 make the salmon fishery as valuable in that river 

 thirty years hence as now. Do not take all the sal- 

 mon out and go away and leave the empty river for 

 your children and children's children; take it out 

 under conditions the conditions are ready to be 

 created for you by the National Fish Commission, 

 which has been so singularly successful in its work 

 which will secure the preservation of that river as 

 a salmon river, which will secure the perpetuation 

 of salmon canneries along its banks, so that it will 



