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 legislation. 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 salmon 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 be not an industry carried on only by Orientals in the employ of three or four alien capitalists, but carried on in such a way as to be a perpetual source of income to the actual settlers resident in the locality. Just in the same way I want to have you see that the lumber industry is exploited in a way which, while giving a great return to those engaged in it at the moment, shall also secure the preservation of the forests for the settlers and the settlers’ children that are to come in and inherit the land. I wish to see such land laws enacted and to see them so administered as to be in the interest of the actual settler who goes to Alaska to live, who desires there to produce crops, to raise stock, to make a home for himself; subject to that condition I desire to see legislation shaped in the spirit of the broadest liberality that will secure the quickest possible development of the resources of Alaska; and with that aim in view to have all the encouragement possible given to those seeking to establish by steamship line and by railway quick and efficient transportation facilities in the Territory.