_Governor Francis, Mr. Mayor, and Fellow-citizens_--It is very grateful and very healthful to be so cordially received by you this morning. The office which I have been called upon to administer is very great in dignity, but it is very full of care and heavy responsibility. The man who with conscientious regard and a proper appreciation of the great trust seeks to administer it for the public good will find himself daily beset with perplexities and doubts, and daily besieged by those who differ with him as to the public administration. But it is a great comfort to know that we have an intelligent, thoughtful, and, at the same time, a very kind people, who judge benevolently and kindly the acts of those public servants of whose good disposition to do right they are not left in doubt. And it is very pleasant to know--and I do not need these eloquent words of assurance to have already impressed upon me--the great lesson that there are more things in which we agree and have common interests than in which we differ. But our differences of opinion as to public administration are all brought together in a genuine patriotism and love of country. [Applause]. It gives me pleasure to witness since my last visit to St. Louis evidence of that steady and uninterrupted growth which this great commercial centre has made since its birth as an Indian trading-post on the Mississippi. No year has been without its added evidences of progress, development, accumulation of wealth, and increase in population. You have now passed any period of doubt or uncertainty, and the career of St. Louis is assured. You have grown like the oak, annually adding a ring to the prosperity and wealth and commercial importance of your great city. You have struck the roots of your influence broad and deep into the nourishing earth of this great fertile land in which you have lived; and the branches--the high branches of your enterprise--are reaching toward the sunlight that shines upon them. You are situated upon the Mississippi River, giving you water communication with the sea, a communication which this Government has undertaken to improve and secure, and which I believe will be made secure by appropriate legislation. [Applause.] Nor do I know any reason why these great lines of railway stretching from St. Louis to the Southwest may not yet touch great ports of commerce, deep harbors, until they shall become trunk lines. We have come to regard only these lines of railway communication to eastern seaboards as trunk lines. I do not know why. Indeed, I believe that in the future, when we shall have seized again, as we will seize if we are true to ourselves, our own fair part of commerce upon the sea, and when we shall have again our appropriate share of South American trade [cheers], that these railroads from St. Louis, touching deep harbors