Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 20.pdf/255

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Qualities of the Oregon Pioneers
239

ing of any part of the United States. These pioneers and their qualities, characteristics and ideals Mr. Proctor has exemplified and shown in this statue.

I have not time to go into details or to show how these pioneers upbuilded and made this beautiful Oregon of today, of which we are so proud.

Many of these pioneers have gone to the Great Beyond and those now living will soon follow to honored graves. It is for their descendants to take up the work which these pioneers left unfinished. What they did can never be forgotten.

But the Oregon pioneers did not comprise all of the people of Anglo-Saxon ancestry and heredity in the United States nor all who were influenced by its traditions and instincts. They exert the great controlling influence in the civilization and life of this country. It was their influence which caused the Declaration of Independence to be made and the war of the American Revolution to be fought. They carry on Anglo-Saxon ideas of the rights of life, liberty, property and the right of the pursuit of happiness. All these have been put to the test in the great world war beginning in 1914. The United States is a peaceful nation. But its people are not pacifists. There was, at first, great horror on account of German atrocities. This nation was greatly stirred by the sinking of the Lusitania. But that was a British ship and its sinking was not an attack upon the United States, dastardly as was the crime of its destruction and the murder of its passengers. While it was an offense against humanity and against civilization, it was not a cause of war for the United States.

But there came a time when the rights and liberties of this country and of the whole world and their peoples became involved; when as a nation, guided by Anglo-Saxon heredity, instincts and traditions, it was not only proper but necessary that this country should be a participant in the war; that this country should make war so there be world peace; and that the liberty of the whole world should be made safe. And