Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.
NUMBER:
476
AUTHOR:
Abraham Lincoln (1809–65)
QUOTATION:
I have very large ideas of the mineral wealth of our Nation. I believe it practically inexhaustible. It abounds all over the western country, from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, and its development has scarcely commenced…. Immigration, which even the war has not stopped, will land upon our shores hundred of thousands more per year from overcrowded Europe. I intend to point them to the gold and silver that waits for them in the West. Tell the miners from me, that I shall promote their interests to the utmost of my ability; because their prosperity is the prosperity of the Nation, and we shall prove in a very few years that we are indeed the treasury of the world.
ATTRIBUTION:
President ABRAHAM LINCOLN, message for the miners of the West, delivered verbally to Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax, who was about to depart on a trip to the West, in the afternoon of April 14, 1865, before Lincoln left for Ford’s Theatre. Colfax delivered the message to a large crowd of citizens in Denver, Colorado, May 27, 1865.—Edward Winslow Martin, The Life and Public Services of Schuyler Colfax, pp. 187–88 (1868).
