302 SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY 



very well to tax me with having said that the United States is a 

 gigantic country — and you can add, of course, on j^our own account, 

 you can go elsewhere when this claim is worked out — but would it 

 not be wiser to contend honestly against tha,t exliaustion? Would it 

 not be better, more patriotic, more unselfish, more manly, more Chris- 

 tian-like, aye, more business-like, to remember that others are coming 

 by the tens o£ thousands every year, and, if instead of making the 

 most of our present spot we begin rolling, the time will soon come 

 when we shall find all the moss gathered. Our fathers and grand- 

 fathers in the East have for some time past learnt the true definition 

 of the word settler. They have found out the difference between it 

 and roamer. Now they care for their farms, nurture them, bestow 

 labor and proper attention upon them, convinced that having found 

 and founded their homes, they are well worth looking after. Of 

 course California is a wonderfully fruitful land, a land of yellow 

 grain, a land of olive and fig tree, a land overflowing with milk and 

 honey, a land where, as one of our poets has said: 



Tiie vine and fig tree are laden with fruit, 

 Where the breezes blow soft as the tones of a lute, 

 The orange tree blossoms and fruits of the vale, 

 The date and ])omegranate 'mid sand and the shade, 

 The filbert and almond and manna of yore, ' 

 All abound in the land that we love and adore. 



This is all very true, these are immense natural advantages, but 

 its richness will no more continue as such unaided, than will the 

 smartest genius ever born make a watch go without a main-spring. 



It requires far less knowledge to wear out one good soil and abandon 

 it for another, than to cultivate a good soil so as to maintain its pro- 

 ductive powers from year to year unimpaired. The East having 

 been first settled and the latter policy having the m.ore generally 

 obtained there, the roving eyes and the then roving feet were turned 

 to the broad stretches of untouched lands that lay in the sun's path. 

 Accordingly, emigration has always been to the West. The West 

 has ever been the Arcadia of the Eastern farmer and of the new- 

 comer. In the West were illimitable fields which needed but to be 

 broken up by the plow to yield their thirty or forty bushels of grain 

 to the acre. Hence the ever full tide of farmers and farmers' sons 

 set westward, and the lands at home were left in a comparatively 

 exhausted or barren state, or needing too much care to be brought 

 back to fertility. But rapid as this progress westward has been, the 

 progress of agriculture as an honest science has not been similarly 

 rapid. In the methods and appliances for labor-saving and quick 

 returns, there have, I know, been wonderful advances, but honest 

 farming, the land culture by those who are earnest yeomen, and not 

 land robbers, has not kept pace. Farmers of California, it will be 

 well for you to remember that there is no West for you! There are 

 doubtless many superficial thinkers, superficial farmers at the same 

 time, who consider the western soil inexhaustible. Prairies, where 

 crop after crop can be taken by generation after generation, bottom 

 lands of the great valleys whicli will produce as they do now for all 

 time. Let me earnestly assure you that there never was a greater 

 fallacy. There are acres by the tens of thousands of lands in counties 

 bordering the Hudson, such counties as Duchess and Albany, from 

 which the early settlers reaped their thirty and forty bushels to the 



