Transcriber’s Note: The cover image was created fromthe title page by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT AT CAIRO, ILLINOIS
OCTOBER 3, 1907
WASHINGTON
GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
1907
I am glad to have the chance to speakto you to-day. This is the heart of whatmay be called the Old West, which wenow call the Middle West, using the termto denote that great group of rich andpowerful States which literally forms the[2]heart of the country. It is a region whosepeople are distinctively American in alltheir thoughts, in all their ways of lookingat life; and in its past and its presentalike it is typical of our country. Theoldest men present can still remember thepioneer days, the days of the white-tiltedox wagon, of the emigrant, and of the logcabin in which that emigrant first livedwhen he settled to his task as a pioneerfarmer. They were rough days, days ofhard work, and the people who did that[3]work seemed themselves uncouth andforbidding to visitors who could not lookbelow the surface. It is curious andamusing to think that even as genuine alover of his kind, a man normally so freefrom national prejudices as Charles Dickens,should have selected the regionwhere we are now standing as the seatof his forlorn “Eden” in Martin Chuzzlewit.The country he so bitterly assailedis now one of the most fertile and productiveportions of one of the most fertile and[4]productive agricultural territories in allthe world, and the dwellers in thisterritory represent a higher average ofcomfort, intelligence, and sturdy capacityfor self-government than the people in anytract of like extent in any other continent.The land teems with beauty and fertility,and but a score of years after Dickenswrote it was shown to be a nursery andbreeding ground of heroes, of soldiers andstatesmen of the highest rank, while therugged worth of the rank and file of the[5]citizenship rendered possible the deeds ofthe mighty men who led in council and inbattle. This was the region that broughtforth mighty Abraham Lincoln, the incarnationof all that is best in democratic life;and from the loins of the same people, livingonly a little farther south, sprang anotherof our greatest Presidents, Andrew Jackson,“Old Hickory”—a man who made mistakes,like most strong men, but a man ofiron will and incorruptible integrity, fearless,upright, devoted to the welfare of his[6]countrymen, bone of our bone and flesh of