_Colonel Streight, Fellow-citizens, and Comrades_--I am very grateful to you for this visit, and for the cordial terms in which your spokesman has extended to me the congratulations of my friends of Benton County. We have men who boast that they are cosmopolitans, citizens of the world. I prefer to say that I am an American citizen [applause], and I freely confess that American interests have the first place in my regard. [Applause.] This is not at all inconsistent with the recognition of that comity between nations which is necessary to the peace of the world. It is not inconsistent with that philanthropy which sympathizes with human distress and oppression the world around. We have been especially favored as an apart nation, separated from the conflicts, jealousies, and intrigues of European courts, with a territory embracing every feature of climate and soil, and resources capable of supplying the wants of our people, of developing a wholesome and gigantic national growth, and of spreading abroad, by their full establishment here, the principles of human liberty and free government. I do not think it inconsistent with the philanthropy of the broadest teacher of human love that we should first have regard for that family of which we are a part. Here in Indiana the drill has just disclosed to us the presence of inexhaustible quantities, in a large area of our State, of that new fuel which has the facility of doing its own transportation, even to the furnace door, and which leaves no residuum to be carried away when it has done its work. This discovery has added an impulse to our growth. It has attracted manufacturing industries from other States. Many of our towns have received, and this city, we may hope, is yet to receive, a great impulse in the development of their manufacturing industries by reason of this discovery. It seems to me that when this fuller development of our manufacturing interests, this building up of a home market for the products of our farms, which is sure to produce here that which has been so obvious elsewhere--a great increase in the value of farms and farm products--is opening to us the pleasant prospect of a rapid growth in wealth, we should be slow to abandon that system of protective duties which looks to the promotion and development of American industry and to the preservation of the highest possible scale of wages for the American workman. [Applause.] The development of our country must be on those lines that benefit all our people. Any development that does not reach and beneficially affect all our people is not to be desired, and cannot be progressive or permanent.