nent, that he might make clear to those to whom under God he was accountable the wisdom and the entire rightness of his conduct and purpose.
He succeeded, but at the sacrifice of his life. When his task was done and his honor vindicated, the limit of his vital power was reached. Still hoping that he might return to the work he loved, he got quickly away to the home of his boyhood, that he might there recruit his failing strength. But his hope proved vain. But a few weeks of failing strength and his work was done.
Jason Lee died in the prime of manhood, just when he seemed to have his hands upon the instrumentalities of a larger work for the land of his love and adoption. But the work he did was great enough to have gratified a larger ambition than was his. It is not to be measured by the completed results as he saw them. It was initiative in its character, and is to be measured by the farther reach of that to which it led.
The ceremony of this day in laying Jason Lee's dust in the soil of this noble State, whose rise here he foresaw and for which he hoped and prayed and toiled, is but a late and worthy answer to that mute and unutterable longing of heart with which in his last conscious moments he turned his eyes to the Western sky and breathed his latest prayer for the land of his love that lay beyond its horizon.
Oregon has received and holds the ashes of many noble men and women who have had an honorable part in the founding and rearing of this commonwealth, but holds the ashes of none more worthy of lasting and grateful remembrance than was he whose ashes we shall commit this day to the sacred soil of these historic precincts.
