STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 183 



ary schemes; oi' whether they loom up as cherished and towering sym- 

 bols of national prosperity and grandeur, and as the fadeless annals of a 

 moral and political superiority, still do they afford the only perfect key 

 to the interpretation of national or individual character. And this is 

 the light of interpretation with which we would translate the eiforts of 

 Mexican authorities and Spanish individuals to explore, settle, and civilize 

 one of the richest and most valuable territories in the world — Northern 

 and Southern California. And whilst we regret the necessity, yet we 

 cannot avoid the conclusion that Mexico, with great natural advantages 

 and extensive political resources, was totally incompetent to achieve a 

 permanent or even important settlement in the country. That the noble 

 and almost divinely animated missionaries, who resolutely battled their 

 way through accumulated difficulties to a glorious, yet limited success; 

 that these, too, lacked the elements of that enlarged, that expanding, 

 general, elevating, and enduring progress which lights up the pathway 

 of Anglo-Saxon energy and volition. All around San Francisco are the 

 remains of missions established nearly one hundred j'ears ago — San 

 Carmel, San Luis Obispo, Santa Clara, San Juan Baptista, San Jose, San 

 Fernando, San Antonia de Padua, Mission Dolores, San Buenaventura, 

 Santa Barbara, Mission of Soledad, of La Purissimo Conception, of Santa 

 Cruz, of San Miguel, of Santa Inez, and Mission of San Antonio — seven- 

 teen missions. These missionary stations ai'c in the very neighborhood 

 of the Golden Gate, and one of them. Mission Dolores, within the city 

 limits, some statistics of which, as late as eigliteen hundred and twenty- 

 five, show these capacities: Twenty-eight thousand dollars (merchan- 

 dise,) sixty thousand head of cattle, one thousand tame horses, fifteen 

 hundred breeding mares, eighty-five staliioiis, seven hundred mules, 

 one hundred thousand sheep, one thousand hogs, four hundred 3'oke of 

 oxen, thirty thousand bushels of wheat and barley, and nineteen thou- 

 sand dollars in specie. And yet how can we believe that, with all these 

 sources of information and power, with such motives for energy, wealth, 

 development, progress; with such opportunity for the establisliment, not 

 of missions, but of empires — how can we believe that under the operation 

 of such influences there were but thirty-two representatives of Spain 

 and Mexico in San Francisco in eighteen hundred and forty-seven ? 

 Nothing can speak louder than such facts; nothing can define with more 

 convincing proof the characteristic force and distinguishing power of 

 two races or nations than such contrasts. In the two newspapers of 

 San Francisco in eighteen hundred and forty-seven ; in their projected 

 public school house; in a few men like Samuel Brannan and B. R. 

 Buckelew; and in that spirit of go-it-alone which the independent Ilett}'" 

 C. Brown manifested, there was more of the magazine power of develop- 

 ment, more germinating force of progress, more daring, resistless, agi- 

 tating, upheaving, and exploring enterprise, more national peculiarity, 

 pride, and achievement, than that which sprang from the previous three 

 hundred and thirteen years of eft'ort to discover, settle, and develop 

 California. Such contrasts admit of but one solution. Nothin<>: but a 

 superior national force of character can aftbrd an explanation. jS o 

 science, no logic can be satisfied with any other conclusion. No record 

 of nature, no proclamation of God, can be written more plainly than 

 are the interpretations of such contrasts of history. 



Eighteen years of the citizenship of the United States has effected a 

 million times more in the settlement, the opening and portrayal of the 

 natural resoui-ces of California and the northern Pacific coast than all 

 the three hundred and thirteen years of Spanish kings, viceroys, and 



