The quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society, Vol. 4, March, 1903-December, 1903Oregon Historical Society
History
The quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society, Vol. 4, March, 1903-December, 1903
Oregon Historical Society
Oregon -- History -- Periodicals
The World's Fair, in this carefully planned purpose, affords a fine
model for the Lewis and Clark Exposition. But Portland is not simply
to do for the Pacific Northwest and the other peoples in close
economic and commercial relations with it what Saint Louis aspires to
do for the world. Saint Louis undertakes what was distinctively the
nineteenth century problem--that of mastery by man of the physical
forces of the world and of more nearly perfect adjustment to his
natural environment. The Louisiana Purchase Exposition, with its World
Congress of the Arts and Sciences, and all of its exhibits arranged to
promote the development of invention and the application of scientific
methods to industry, has a great mission; and yet the peculiar field
which belongs to the Lewis and Clark Exposition gives it, if not a
greater mission, at least one more advanced--if you please a twentieth
century mission. Man in the Pacific Northwest has a peculiar problem.
All the science and art of the past are his legacy. They fairly press
in upon him in their appeal to him for utilization here. Man here has
a physical environment so rich and so diversified as not only to
invite the largest application of science and art, but also one that
demands the highest organization of associated effort. In other
words, the Pacific Northwest places man in such relation to history,
to nature, and to his fellow-man, as to promise him here, if his
inheritance is not sold for a mess of pottage, man's highest
development. It rests with the Lewis and Clark Exposition to rise to
the occasion. For it represents a first possible step in a grand
cooperative effort to develop a social environment here commensurate
with what nature has done for us. If for a ruthless, wasteful course
of social evolution that would never reach any desirable goal we would
realize one of steady, frictionless progress, with opportunities of
fullest life open to all, we must make the Lewis and Clark Centennial
fulfill its high mission. If the people of Oregon and the Pacific
Northwest do not persist in their determination to make this concerted
effort toward the inauguration of the highest policies of social
progress here it is hard to see what occasion can bring them so near
this mood again. It is the spell that the commemoration of a great
event and a great movement casts over them that will hardly be
repeated. The Lewis and Clark Centennial then is the flood tide of
opportunity. If it is not seized and we lapse again into mere
individualistic policies "all the voyage" of life in the future of the
Pacific Northwest will be bound in comparative "shallows and in
miseries."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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