FOUKTH DISTRICT AGRICULTURAL ASSOCIATION. 281 



earth, like the human countenance, has its expressions. There is 

 upon it the wild and untamed luxuriance of nature, or the softness 

 and elegance of culture. Now its countenance is gloomy, savage, and 

 terrilic, and now it is mild, ethereal, and lovely. This face and 

 aspect of nature it is the high prerogative of man to change. Her 

 features are molded into lines of softness and beauty by the plastic 

 hand of toil. 



What a contrast our own State presents to the Knights Templar 

 who visited it lately, to that presented to the pioneer of '49. True, 

 the general contour, the outlines of the coast, and the lines of the moun- 

 tain ranges are the same, but the face of your villages are so changed 

 that if some pioneer should wake up from a Rip Van Winkle sleep 

 of thirty-four years, he would not recognize them, with their fields of 

 flowing grain, instead of wild mustard, their orchards with richly 

 laden trees, their lovely gardens, and tasteful homes, and populous 

 towns. The fact is, that to the farmer is given the high honor of 

 finishing and improving the Creator's work. He made the sea, and 

 the mountains, and the heavens as he would have them, complete at 

 the first. But the earth, with its animal and vegetable tribes, he 

 only made in the rough, and left man to put on the flnishing. It 

 was Adam's skill and labor that made Eden, and when he left it 

 went back to wild land. Every acre of opulent swamp and boun- 

 teous tule, from which coarse grasses are banished, and frogs, snakes, 

 turtles, and mudhens driven, is really so much land created; and so 

 is it creation when fifty acres is made as productive by deep plowing 

 and fertilizing as one hundred is by " scratchiculture." And I want 

 to say here that California farmers seem to have but imperfectly 

 learned the aphorism, " Feed the land and it will feed you." You 

 remember how Victor Hugo, in Lcs Miserables, tells the Parisians 

 that the sewerage of the great sewer of Paris would feed all Paris, 

 if used as a fertilizer, instead of being carried to the Seine and to the 

 sea ? Japan is about as large as England and Ireland, and only half 

 of it is fit for tillage. It has a larger population than Great Britain 

 and Ireland. And yet while England imports food annually, at a 

 cost of millions of pounds, Japan exports grain every year. They 

 have kept up the soil by using every available fertilizer in the king- 

 dom, through ages that stretch back to the time of Moses; whereas, the 

 soil of California, rich as it is, will not stand our present cut-throat sys- 

 tem of agriculture one hundred years. One half of the twelve million 

 acres of New York State have been almost ruined by "skinners," who 

 take everything from the soil and give nothing back. A great deal 

 of farming land in the Eastern States has been exhausted and the 

 farmers have come AVest. But, farmers of the Pacific Coast, there is 

 no West for you! Our large farms and our continuous croppings 

 without rotation, especially where we have no Winter nor snow to 

 rest, fallow, and mellow the soil, and our almost universal neglect of 

 fertilizers is, it seems to me, the threefold peril to our agricultural 

 future. Your cattle have mouths and stomachs and must be fed, and 

 those that have been best fed and cared for, other things being equal, 

 will carry off the premiums on Saturday. But a plant has a thou- 

 sand mouths, and every one must be fed, and every one leaves less for 

 the others. Treat the soil as a factory. If you want a fabric, furnish 

 the warp and woof and you shall have it, but don't kill the goose that 

 lays the golden eggs. 



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