OPENING ADDRESS. 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY, SEPTEMBER 

 SEVENTH, EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND SIXTY- NINE. 



By CHAS. F. KEED, President. 



Gentlemen and Ladies, and Members of the State Agricultural Society : 



Having occupied this position, and addressed you from this same stand 

 upon the subject of agriculture, on so many occasions like the present, I 

 feel almost at a loss what to say that can interest you or that will be 

 appropriate to the occasion. On an ordinary occasion, with no new 

 events to record, with no great achievements accomplished, with no 

 grand marches toward prosperity, permanent and lasting, for our State, 

 I feel that I might well be excused from saying anything to you to-night, 

 except, perhaps, to greet you with congratulations upon the general 

 prosperity of our people, and might be content to remain a silent looker- 

 on where there is so much to be seen and learned. But the present 

 occasion is no ordinary one for our State. The history of California 

 from its very beginning is pregnant with grand events. To say nothing 

 of the commercial and monetary revolutions, extending throughout the 

 world, which have been brought about by the discovery of her mines of 

 precious metals — of her jingling gold and silver coin having taken the 

 place of intrinsically worthless paper in all the great money exchanges 

 — to say nothing of the liberality with which she poured out that gold 

 and silver in the interest of suffering humanity, when her country's 

 defenders needed her assistance — to say nothing of the crowns of glory 

 with which her name will ever be encircled, in consequence of the nobfe 

 deeds of her sons on the great battlefield of liberty, both on land and 

 sea — to say nothing of the valuable discoveries in science, of the great 

 improvements in mechanics and the arts, for which the world is indebted 

 to her — to say nothing of the explosion of old and erroneous theories in 

 political economy, and the adoption of new and correct ones, which she 

 has occasioned in all the civilized Governments of the earth — to say 

 nothing of her achievements in agriculture, of her supplying the grain 

 marts of the world with wheat superior to that of all other countries, of 

 the immense quantities and superior excellence of her fruits, embracing 



