STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 79 



and invigorate our commerce. In addition to all this, we have recently 

 established a line of ocean steamers to China and Japan, which is to open 

 a new chapter in the history of those ancient and mysterious nations. 

 Their musty secrets arc to be revealed, their habits and modes of life 

 scrutinized, their industries examined and their commerce vastly 

 enlarged. To the people of California this enterprise is one of immense 

 significance. It foreshadows a commercial intercourse with those rich 

 and populous empires which at an early day will swell into vast propor- 

 tions as seriously to affect the great channels of trade throughout the 

 world: and there are some persons who are sanguine in the belief that, 

 owing to our central position on the great highway of travel, between 

 the Occident and the Orient, the day is not far remote when San Fran- 

 cisco will become, as London now is, the great centre of exchange for 

 the whole world. 



But the ocean line to China and Japan would be comparatively of 

 little value unless it connected with a railway across the continent. This 

 great link in the highway of nations is already nearly an accomplished 

 fact. The summits of the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains have 

 been scaled by the iron horse, who has frightened the buffalo and the 

 grizzly bear from their accustomed haunts, and is pushing his triumphant 

 way rapidly across the arid plains of the Great Basin. In a few short 

 months this gigantic work will stand forth, in all its beautiful and grand 

 proportion, an accomplished fact, a marvel of engineering skill, a noble 

 monument of national and individual enterprise; no longer a myth, a 

 chimera of the brain, but a glorious, visible, tangible reality, creating 

 and dispensing wealth, peopling the desert places, building up towns 

 and cities, with churches and school houses, and distributing abroad the 

 rich products of our own and other lands. I shall thank God if I shall 

 be permitted to live to witness this realization of so grand a scheme of 

 national improvement. In the year eighteen hundred and fifty-one, 

 whilst residing at St. Louis, I delivered an address on the occasion of 

 breaking ground for the construction of the Hannibal and St Joseph 

 Eailroad, in the State of Missouri ; and on that occasion t said : " The 

 time is not far distant when } t ou will be able to travel from St. Joseph, 

 on the Indian frontier, to Boston, the heart of New England, or from 

 New Orleans, on the Gulf, to New York, on the Atlantic, in the space of 

 three days. Nor, I hope, is the day very remote, when the costly fabrics 

 of the East Indies and the gold of California will be conveyed from 

 the El Dorado of the Pacific to St. Louis, the metropolis of the west, in 

 the short space of five or six days." I then had but a faint hope that I 

 should live to see this prediction verified; and yet, seventeen years 

 later, here 1 am to-day, in the Capital of California, at the opposite end 

 of the great railway, within a stone's throw of its locomotives, as they 

 come thundering down from the summit of the Sierra Nevada, eight 

 thousand feet above the level of the sea, and rejoicing with you at the 

 near consummation of this great enterprise ! Having aided to inaugu- 

 rate its commencement, at one of its Eastern termini, I shall esteem 

 myself doubly fortunate if it shall be m} T lot to unite with .you at its 

 Western terrains, in celebrating its completion. The day on which the 

 first through train from New York arrives at Sacramento will mark a 

 new epoch in our history, and should be celebrated with bonfires and the 

 ringing of bells, to attest our appreciation of it. 



Having thus discussed in a most discursive manner our condition and 

 prospects as an agricultural, manufacturing and commercial people, it 

 may naturally be expected that some space should be devoted to our 



