STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 199 



breed, constitute his teams; the time not given to the cultivation of his 

 larger crops is devoted to his orchard, his garden, and the improvement of 

 his lands; his sons find constant employment at home and learn to love 

 home life; the cities afford a remunerative market for the surplus products 

 of his farm, and each year he accumulates something, which, though it 

 be small, is preserved for his children when they become heads of families 

 and need homes for themselves. These States, with comparatively sterile 

 soil and with a rigorous winter climate, are wealthy and prosperous. His- 

 tory teaches us that large land holdings are obstructions to increase in popu- 

 lation and wealth. As Aristotle said, '' The best manure for land is the 

 foot of its owner." The former backwardness of the beautiful South, with 

 her broad acres of naturally productive soil, as compared with the material 

 advancement of the vigorous North, was not owing to her former institu- 

 tion of human slavery, now happily ended in this country forever, any 

 more than it was to the immense plantations then held by the few, and to 

 the impossibility for the many to secure lands there, whereon to establish 

 homes owned by themselves. 



Another obstacle formerly existing to the rapid increase of California in 

 population, I will mention. When Governor Stanford and his associates, 

 through their indomitable energy, caused the locomotives of their road to 

 climb the foothills from the Sacramento Valley eastwardly, to speed along 

 the mountains' sides, and across the dry and sterile plains of Nevada and 

 Northern Utah, and meet at Ogden the locomotives advancing from the 

 East, it was the wish of the Directors of the Central Pacific Railroad Com- 

 pany to establish rates of fare low enough to induce immigrants to seek 

 the Pacific Coast and there establish homes. It was for the interest of 

 this company to do this. The company had lands to sell. A material 

 increase in the population and wealth of California would advance the 

 market value of the company's lands, and increase the amount of travel 

 and traffic on their road, and thus add materially to its revenues. The 

 great railroad corporations, however, which controlled the connections 

 with the Pacific railroads easterly from Ogden, had no wish to build up 

 California; they had no interest in so doing. Secure, as they deemed, in 

 possessing their share of the transcontinental traffic from ocean to ocean, 

 they were indifferent to any advantages which California might derive 

 from increase of population. They wished to increase the population of 

 the States and Territories, whose local business would be wholly tributary 

 to their own roads, and they refused, as I understand, to establish with 

 the California company any pro rata tariff of fares which would enable the 

 emigrant to travel cheaply from the East to the Pacific; but they did 

 establish a rate of fares which enabled the emigrant to travel cheaply to 

 the States and Territories in which were the termini of their own roads; 

 and such States and Territories, with a soil less fertile than 'that of Cali- 

 fornia, and with a rigorous climate, increased rapidly in population and in 

 wealth. Most of the obstacles I have mentioned to the material advance- 

 ment of this State have been overcome. The residue are rapidly disap- 

 pearing. 



The Directors of the California railroad company, with the same energy 

 which characterized the construction of their road from Sacramento to 

 Ogden, built another road, independent of eastern railroad connections, 

 up the San Joaquin Valley, across the Mojave Desert, climbing the moun- 

 tain through looped tunnel, passing the beautiful City of the Angels, span- 

 ning the rapid Colorado, up the Gila, through the heated clime of Arizona, 

 down the Rio Grande, across the plains of Texas, and reaching ports of 

 the Gulf of Mexico, at whose wharves were sea-going ships. This road 



