SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY AGRICULTURAL ASSOCIATION. 231 



and education to three thousand three hundred and thirty-three 

 persons; that gave a nourishing village, with churches and schools 

 on every square of ten miles, and was the basis, firm and unchang- 

 ing, upon which were reared the trade, the industry, the commerce 

 of the magnificent Empire State. Such farms as this would trans- 

 figure the Valleys of the San Joaquin and Sacramento, the great 

 plains of Salinas and Santa Clara. Like the fruitful plains of Lom- 

 hardy, nestled beneath the Julian Alps, they would literally blossom 

 like the rose, for fruitful gardens produce everything that ought to 

 be demanded to make men happy and build up a State. 



A recent magazine writer declares that large farming is not 

 farming at all. It is mining for wheat. In one point of view, 

 it is a manufacturing business in which clods are fed to the mill 

 and grain appears in carloads. Such farming holds the same 

 relation to society as does a manufacturing corporation. Their 

 laborers are workers for six months, and tramps the other six. 

 Foreign distress their friend, and the world's hunger their steady 

 customer. Mr. Larue has considered only the sterner features 

 of the guild: the order, the machine, the minimum of expense, 

 the maximum of product, and not to those pleasanter features to 

 which I have referred: the school house, the church, the library, the 

 social circle, the moral influence, the intelligence that lays at the base 

 and foundation of the political and governmental fabric. This kind 

 of farming would make California. One third of its population would 

 not gather in its one great city, in which city one portion lives in dis- 

 contented poverty, one portion hangs by its eyelids upon the ragged 

 edge of genteel pauperism; and one part lives as live the fish in the 

 sea — by eating each other. It would give our State a splendid, happy 

 people — a satisfied, prosperous, and contented population, with no 

 swarming sand lots, no scheming politicians, no discontented, un- 

 happy gambling classes. 



Small farming is the panacea for about all the ills of life. It is a 

 solution of all the most vexed problems of political economy. In 

 that country where the people who own the land cultivate it, and 

 govern it, the doctrines of Malthus, and Ricordo, and Adam Smith, 

 and all the philosophers who have endeavored to accommodate the 

 science of government to the use of the class that has conquered States 

 and monopolized its lands, will not apply. All this will come in time, 

 and it will come to our country. It is coming now to the Southern 

 States, to the Western States, and we begin to see the iron grasp of 

 the great land monopolist relaxing here in California. May the good 

 God speed the coming of that happy time, when in Europe and in 

 America, in Ireland and in California, every man who is willing to 

 till the land shall have as much, and no more, than he can advanta- 

 geously cultivate. 



Agriculture is of all the sciences the one that progresses most 

 slowly, but the one that never takes a step backward, and rarely ever 

 a doubtful step in advance.- The art of husbandry is older than 

 history. It is older than the hieroglyphics on Assyrian tombs. By 

 the ancient Greeks, the art of agriculture was assigned to Hiptolemus, 

 and he was taught by Ceres, an unprofitable fable, showing that agri- 

 culture is historically older than fable or story. 



In every free country, among every free people, it has held the 

 highest rank among the peaceful arts, and it has never been degraded 

 except among a degraded people that have first lost their liberties. 



