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Show OUR MESSAGE TO THE LEGISLATURE. Gentlemen of the incoming Legislature of Utah when, on Monday next you meet and take your oaths of office, pray" lift your eyes and make your horizons as broad as possible. While doing what you can for Utah keep in mind that Utah is but one state of the great Union, that while legislating legislat-ing for Utah your thought should be that your state must keep step with her sister states, in their , onward glorious progress. We speak this way be- ' cause some of your number only recently began to 5 consider this region in connection with the whole country. f All through early life, to you this was an ex- elusive place, and you did not believe that God's i smile extended much beyond its borders, you read ' or heard repeated the story of the coming here . of the pioneers, of their trials and triumphs; how 4 the desert Anally relaxed its frowns and began to f smile, and you said to yourselves: "Never before I were there such trials, never before such triumphs, t ours surely are God's people." , But the conquest of thiE country, the wresting it from the savage, the felling of the forests, the j beating back of the frontier, were against hard- 4 ships, dangers, incessant toil, with but meager re-t re-t wards, and it continued two hundred and fifty J years, while eight generations of men and women f lived and died. But those first Pioneers did more to subdue savages and convert the soil on which 5 the forests grew into smiling fields; they were a fc thinking race and out of their thoughts and W through their hardships, there was evolved the E conviction which finally, in the trail of a bloody J war and above its wreck, caused the temple of liberty to be erected. The thought was to frame m a government which should be of the people, by the people, and for the people. The seeds of this k liberty tree were first planted in the harsh soils of W Massachusetts and of Virginia, but it grew for it L was guarded and tended. Sometimes its roots were R moistened by tears, and the hopes in the hearts F of thp people, shining out, warmed the air around R it. Tne first comers were fresh from the lands C ruled over by kings and dominated by priests. k Thosf Pioneers knew the world's history well; R they knew that power in a few hands always de-L de-L generates into tyranny and cruelty, that ends in K national decay. In thought they counted the r wrecks of nations that strew the Old World's B shores and they determined that on these shores the only nobility that should ever exist should be the nobility of manhood and womanhood, and JK that promotion should come of merit, not through P foe accident of birth. ) Again, noting the fact that all the soil of the Old World has been soaked by the blood shed in religious wars, they determined that in this land religion should be free and carefully guarded, but that it should never any more encroach upon the state than the state should encroach upon religion. Thousands died to cause this dream of liberty to materialize, and when later the structure was endangered tens and hundreds of thousands more died "that free government might not perish from the earth." We see the effect. In one hundred and fifteen years the nation, springing from almost al-most nothing, has become the foremost of earthly powers; great in the number of its people, magnificent mag-nificent in achievements and with its unmeasured unmeas-ured power it is sweeping on with ever increasing increas-ing splendors, while to find rest and to have hope renewed a half million of people from beyond the sea, come yearly under our flag. We call attention to these things to impress upon you gentlemen of the Legislature the fact that Utah is a part of this galaxy of stars which we call states, and that the men of Utah to be in full accord with the men of other states must keep ever in mind the principles on which our government was founded; that it was to be a government gov-ernment "of the people, by the people, and for the people," that the plan of the fathers may reach full fruition and that "free government may not perish from the earth." |