Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 7.pdf/293

Rh to every American citizen, without relation to color or to sex, and does not class our wives, our sisters, and our mothers, politically, with criminals, imbeciles, and Indians not taxed.

Idaho extends her arms to the world. She invites the world to come and participate in her development. She invites the capitalist, and points to the opportunities for manufacture to her great natural water power, to her mines and forests undeveloped and uncut. She invites the farmer and points to the great tracts of arid land soon to be reclaimed by private enterprise or by the reclamation service of a beneficent government. She invites the tourist and points to her great natural beauties of river and mountain and forest and lake. She invites the invalid, for whom in a more rigorous climate, a lower altitude or a more humid atmosphere there is no hope of health, and, last, but not least, she invites the laborer, for labor is the basis of all prosperity. And the people are answering the call. They are coming to Idaho. In the past ten years they have doubled our population and quadrupled the amount of land under irrigation. They are transforming the State. They are converting our arid plains into fertile fields, and are making her to be in fact what her name literally implies—Idaho, Gem of the Mountains.