SUMMARY REVIEW.

Thus have I attempted to present to you the more salient features of the rise and growth of our varied systems of transportation, that mighty factor of our civilization. We have ascended the stream of time to the tumuli of the unknown dead. We have carried copper with them, in nameless boats, through lakelet and river. We have paddled in the birch canoe of the historic Indian. We have seen strange fleets of early craft, loaded with pelts, stealing beneath the beetling rocks of our great lake, at the very twilight dawn of our story. We have stood with Le Sueur, on the deck of his felucca, as he ascended our rivers two centuries ago. We have beheld the lordly fur companies as they strode upon the scene, carrying their transportation to the far off Great Slave lake, a region so distant that we ourselves have not yet dared to invade it. We have been with the scholarly Schoolcraft, in 1820, as he proudly waved his hand to the advent of his country's flag and vessels when they first made entry to the waters of the "unsalted sea." We have stood, with the early immigrants, on the decks of the first steamboats which ascended our streams. We have been with Kittson and heard the screeching of the greaseless wheels of a wonderful commerce that arose in the far North. We have travelled by dog sledges amid the solitude of snows. We have welcomed, with Edmund Rice, the scepter of a new king in that wonderful horse whose sinews are steel, and whose breath is steam, and have listened to the far echoes of his shrill whistle over our prairies, as it proclaimed the death of the old carriers and the birth of the new. We have beheld our railways rivet their bracelets of steel all over the bosom of our commonwealth, till every hamlet is served with highways better than Rome under the empire of the Cæsars ever dreamed of possessing. But, not content with granting superb facilities within our own limits, we have seen our aggressive men of affairs pick up the ends of the steel ribbons, pass beyond the barriers of the state, and carry them across a continent to the waters of the Pacific.

We are pleased to remember, this day, that this admirable system of transportation rests upon a base of inexhaustible

resources.

We offer no Klondike, with specious gates of gold, amid pillars of ice, but that which is a thousand times better for morality and stability. Our resources challenge all that is good in the genius and energy of our sons. Over every square mile of our commonwealth, nature has spread her prodigal garniture with a princely hand. Ceres pours over us her wealth from the horn of plenty. But turn our soil and plant, and God's sun will kiss it into wealth. Only the voluntarily idle can be disinherited in Minnesota.

Possessing all these enriching conditions, even with but a respectable government and only a moderate race of statesmen, our splendid body of business men will still carry our state forward to a superb destiny. When we consider that the greater and better part of all this has been wrought during the span of a single human life, we behold a miracle of performance, in which most of you were the living actors. Never again will life present the same magnificent drama of events as the panorama you have witnessed.

In surveying it all, I feel that, as the wise men of the East followed that star which came and stood over the place where the infant Savior was born, so we, impelled by some good Providence, followed the Star of the North, till it stood above a virgin empire of undeveloped wealth, which was for us, and for our children, the promised land.

HOW WE WON THE SAN JUAN ARCHIPELAGO.*

BY GENERAL EDWIN C. MASON.

I propose to relate some incidents, not generally known to the public, in the final settlement of the Northwest Boundary between the United States and the British Possessions.

Part of my information is derived from the records of the War Department, but chiefly from conversations with actors in the scene. For many years I was the Inspector General of the Military Department of the Columbia, which includes within its boundaries the Puget Sound region, where the difficulties occurred. My duties required me to make frequent visits to San Juan island during the period of the joint occupation, and I became interested in this bit of American history because we were never nearer a war with England than at that time. The story I shall tell brings out one feature in the training of the American professional soldier. He is taught that every means for the peaceable settlement of a difficulty should be tried before force is used, but that there must be at the same time no surrender of the rights and dignity of the nation. The patience and forbearance of our trained army and naval officers has saved our country from bloodshed and loss of treasure, in more than one difficulty with foreign powers, with the Indians on our plains, and the lawless mobs in our cities. In the San Juan affair General Winfield Scott won the title of "The Great Pacificator." His countrymen did well in bestowing upon him this title, for his pacific course on that occasion saved us from war.

Read at the monthly meeting of the Executive Council, November 9, 1896. General Mason died April 30, 1898.