STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 169 



every one. Take this amount from the world's business, and where 

 would be the great lines of steamships, railroads and telegraph that 

 within that time have girdled and seamed up the world ? Within twenty 

 years the work of previous centuries has been done. Man has been 

 elevated, his powers Enlarged, his views and grasp expanded, and his 

 very life quadrupled, because made capable of four times as much useful- 

 ness, development and power, as was ever possible before. 



I know it is easy to sneer and cavil at the figures made, even by 

 intelligent enthusiasm. But will the doubter tell me, when he must 

 admit that the capital has existed, and that the world's business has, at 

 the same time, been thus enormously developed, where the capital has 

 been lying idle, and what else has produced these great results? 



I have not, in this discussion, for one moment lost sight of my ques- 

 tion, " Who is California ?" I prefer to answer it by her record — by 

 showing what she has done and is doing. Whoever will remember that 

 all her capital, and not merely the average, is now working on in the 

 world's business, and that she is yearly adding from her surplus agricul- 

 tural and mineral wealth much more than sixty millions more, and then 

 carrying on the figures for the next ten years, by inexorable mathemati- 

 cal law, will arrive at a result that will endanger his reputation for sanity 

 if he shall dare whisper it to any one else, but that will be more than 

 realized in the progress of events. 



Whoever has watched the development of the State of New York 

 during the last thirty or forty years cannot fail to remember the persis- 

 tent courage with which from time to time, as opportunit3 T offered, the 

 distinguished Samuel B. Kuggles has dared to be sneered at for placing 

 before the people the startling figures that measured the coming pros- 

 perity of that great State. 



It was with him neither idle guessing nor the delusive product of an 

 undisciplined imagination. If to accurate^ foretell the future belongs 

 to the spirit of prophecy, then " his lips had been touched with a live 

 coal," fresh from the altar of truth. By a process, simple as the fun- 

 damental rules of arithmetic, he read what was to be by what was. He 

 said if so many men in ten years, with a given capital, produced certain 

 ascertained results, then twice the number, with double the capital and 

 under the same circumstances will, of necessity, produce twice as much. 

 That was the whole basis of the calculation, and carrying it on for suc- 

 cessive periods he thus mapped out the coming development of New 

 York, to be sneered at by the timid and ridiculed by the doubters, and 

 believed by nobody, but to be worked out and demonstrated by the pro- 

 gress of events, to a degree that has proven his calculations to be almost 

 as reliable as the census itself. He had his reward in living to see the 

 prosperity he had predicted, but not in seeing the world ready to believe 

 in and act on his great idea. 



" What has been, will be !" Solomon said it thousands of years ago, 

 and even yet we teach our children that he was " the wisest man/' 

 because he knew enough to recognize and indorse the great truth. 

 Buggies echoed it, demonstrated it in advance, and time has proved it 

 again. And yet, with all this evidence, you who are here to-night are 

 wiser than they, and do not believe it with any of that practical faith 

 that will cause you to act on it in your business and your lives. Nay, 

 more — if I should here and now take the measure of your past progress 

 as a guide, and assume that with all your increased facilities, and your 



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