It has been indeed a pleasure for me to come to-day within the limits of your mighty and beautiful State. This afternoon I have been traveling through a veritable garden of the Lord. It is only a few weeks ago that I did my part in helping on the growth here when I signed the bill under which the Trinity River will be improved, which I was mighty glad to do. For I think that we Americans have learned the lesson that whatever is good for some of us is good for all of us. We are all going to go up, and not down, because we are going to go together. I have been impressed even more than by the beauty and fertility of your State by the character of its people. Surely no President could be more touched by any greeting than by a greeting such as this; and above all (I know the others of you will not mind my saying) to be greeted by the men who, when the hour of trial came in 1861, sprang to arms, and whether they wore the blue, or whether they wore the gray, proved the sincerity of their devotion by the valor with which they risked their lives. Oh, my fellow-countrymen, think what a blessed thing it is that now every man in this land can feel the same pride in the valor and devotion of those who fought for one side and of those who fought for the other! I can, in a sense, claim to be, by blood at least, a typical President, for I am half Southern and half Northern; I was born in the East and I have lived much in and learned much from the West. The Civil War has left us as a heritage of honor not merely the memory of the mighty deeds done in it alike by the men of the North and the men of the South; it has left us also as an inspiration and a memory the way in which when the war was over those men turned to the works of peace, and wrought out in peace success exactly as they had wrought it out in war. I come to Texas not for the first time. Seven years ago, again there was a call to arms, a call to arms against a foreign foe. It then fell to my lot to come here to help in raising a regiment, a regiment in which I think over half of the men had fathers who served in the Confederate army, and about one-third, perhaps somewhat more, fathers who served in the Union army. We were the sons of the men who wore the blue, the sons of the men who wore the gray, and our only desire was to show ourselves not wholly unworthy of the mighty men of the years that are past.