92 



ANNUAL ADDRESS 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY, AT SACRA- 

 MENTO, ON THURSDAY EVENING, SEPTEMBER TWENTIETH, 

 EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-SEVEN. 



BY HON. N. GREENE CURTIS, OF SACRAMENTO. 



Mr. President, Ladies, and Gentlemen : Since your last annual 

 meeting another year has come and gone. Its stirring events and 

 vicissitudes are of the past. The hopes it awakened, and the sorrows 

 it produced, the joys and blights it brought, and the tears that it 

 started or dried, are swept away from us forever. But we have 

 come together for the purposes of the present and the future. It is 

 pleasing to indulge in retrospects, but only useful as we apply them 

 to the great duties and labors of life. It is the fiat of omnipotence that 

 our passage through life should be made with a velocity apparently 

 increasing in geometrical ratio. The day, the week, the month, the 

 year, each seems but a tithe of its predecessor. Opening with the 

 star of hope, each marks its meridian with the hand of toil, and 

 crowns its close with the fruition of its morning dream, or with a 

 lesson upon the uncertainty of human anticipations. The indomit- 

 able energy, the unflagging enterprise of our people, leaves little 

 chance of hope, while our perseverance and industry secures to us a 

 more desirable fruition than other less favored communities, and 

 frees us from drinking of the cup of sorrow, or treading the barren 

 waste of disappointment. We meet annually to correct the errors of 

 the past, to merge personal views in congregated wisdom, to bury 

 prejudice, and by the electric current of fraternal feeling to cancel 

 space and fuse the whole body into a living mass, so that with one 

 heart and one soul we may enter upon the duties of another year 

 consecrated anew to the service of the State and to the happiness 

 and prosperity of the people. Coming together with such views, 

 and animated by the prospects of a glorious fruition, believed to be 

 within the reach of human achievement, let us earnestly seek, as with 

 one heart and one purpose, to devise means the best calculated to 

 forward the grand objects of this Society. After the vicissitudes and 

 changes of the year it is fit that we return thanks to the Supreme 

 Ruler for the inestimable blessing so bounteously bestowed upon our 

 beloved commonwealth. By His favor we have been protected from 

 danger, disease, and death, and we are permitted once more to assem- 

 ble in peace, happiness, and prosperity. Here, to-day, we meet to 

 promote the happiness of each other, and to advance the interests of 

 the State. Here, to-day, all asperities are dissolved, all distinctions 

 are done away, geographical lines are obliterated, sectional jealousies 

 are forgotten, political strifes and discord are hushed, and here wo 

 renew our friendships and pledge our energies to the support of the 

 great agricultural and industrial interest, protected and fostered by 



