STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 61 



BUEEAU OF IMMIGEATION. 



"With the proper power or authority conferred upon it, and with the 

 requisite means placed at its disposal, and perhaps with more economy 

 and efficiency than a new organization, the State Board of Agriculture 

 would become what many of the States, and particularly the more enter- 

 prising of those lately in rebellion, have established, as a separate and 

 distinct body, a Bureau of Immigration. By the close of the war and 

 the abolition of slavery in the Southern States, a vast amount of terri- 

 tory heretofore sealed to the introduction of free labor has been opened, 

 and is already in the field setting forth the productiveness of its soil, the 

 even temperature of its climate, the richness of its mines, the advan- 

 tages — for manufacturing purposes — of its numerous watercourses, and 

 the certainty and capacity of its markets, as inducements to capital and 

 labor to seek within its borders profitable investment and a happy home. 

 If nothing else can awake California to her interests and duties, the fact 

 that such an extensive and active increase in the competition for the 

 labor and capital of the world has thus sprung into existence, and that 

 that competition threatens to deplete still more her own population, 

 should induce her to put forth earnest and active efforts to retain the 

 laurels with which nature has endowed her, but which it is threatened 

 to snatch from her crown. 



We should have books and circulars filled with authoritative and reli- 

 able information as to our climate, soil, mines, productions, manufacto- 

 ries, commercial location, and other advantages, distributed in every 

 country from which an emigrant is about to seek a home in the new 

 world. We should have agencies, competent and alive with the import- 

 ance of their commissions, established in the old countries and in the 

 Atlantic States, to call the attention of people to these facts and figures, 

 and to give such information as they cannot obtain in any other manner. 

 We should have steamers and clipper ships pl^'ing between San Francisco 

 and every important port of emigration, to bring immigrants and their 

 families hither, at so low a rate and with such certainty and regularity 

 as will place the passage within the means of the laboring classes, and 

 will render the trip a desirable one. 



We should have such mail facilities established as will enable them, 

 when here, to communicate freely to the friends they left behind those 

 persuasive facts, the privileges, luxuries, and advantages they find in 

 their new homes, to which they had previously been strangers. Here is 

 work for our Legislature, and our representatives at the national capital. 

 And here capitalists, landowners, railroad and steamboat companies, and 

 the owners of clipper ships, may find direction for energy and profitable 

 enterprise. 



We cannot better express our views upon this subject than by quoting 

 from our re^jort to the members of the society for eighteen hundred and 

 sixty-four. We then said : 



" We know we have within our borders the elements of greatness and 

 prosperity equal, if not superior, to those of any other State in the 

 Union. Then what do we lack ? what do we need? The answer most 

 emphatically is, labor and capital. We cannot attain material greatness 

 or prosper well Avithout these — without both ; and capital fin- invest- 

 ment in our material resources will not, for obvious reasons, precede 



