STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 171 



carrying the aggregate of production above what it was in their palmiest 

 days? Do you realize, as } T ou read day by day of the sailing of ship 

 after ship laden with agricultural products, that our surplus thus exported 

 already exceeds twenty millions of dollars per annum? For myself, I 

 sit down in wonder before this great fact. Forty dollars each for every 

 man, woman and child in the State, of surplus agricultural productions, 

 exported each year to suppty the wants of the rest of the world, by a 

 people that but the other day would have starved if their supply ships 

 had had longer voyages than usual, and from a soil that half the world 

 believed to be a desert, until the food it sent them forced the falsehood 

 down their hungry throats. Forty dollars each ! To equal it, Great 

 Britain, hugging itself for all it is, and a good deal that it is not, must 

 export fourteen hundred millions per annum, and our brethren on the 

 other side of the continent, who have not entirely got over the idea that 

 we are yet in swaddling bands, must supplement the forty millions that 

 they promise us at the next census with sixteen hundred millions of dol- 

 lars of annual surplus sent abroad. Add to all this, that nowhere else 

 on God's earth is the quantity consumed at 'home anywhere near as 

 great as it is with us, that food is so plenty and so cheap that it is used 

 freely and scattered lavishly, so that in all our borders hunger and want 

 are almost unknown, and we have a fact that if it could be put in form 

 to he fully understood Uy all the laboring classes abroad, and supported 

 by evidence that would secure to it the absolute belief that it deserves, 

 would depopulate those old empires of all the energy or industry that is 

 left in them, and pour it in one mighty flood upon our shores. 



Perhaps I have gone as far with these figures as prudence would 

 warrant. The world is never ready to believe any more than it has 

 itself seen, and when new and startling facts are adverse to their interests, 

 their incredulity is precisely equal to the call thus made upon it. But it 

 surely has not escaped your attention that I have made no allusion to 

 the export of gold, precisely as much a surplus product of our industry 

 as our wheat. Taking into the account only the twenty-five million 

 dollars known to be exclusively Californian, and without including a 

 dollar of the nearly equal sums from the States around us, although 

 that is in no small degree the product of California capital and industry, 

 we have the astounding result of ninety dollars a year exported for 

 every soul within our borders. At the same rate, Great Britain would 

 export annually three billion one hundred and fifty million dollars; 

 Illinois, two hundred and fifty million dollars; the State of New York, 

 over three hundred and sixty million dollars; and the whole Atlantic 

 States, three billion six hundred million dollars every year. The figures 

 are right, whether you believe them or not ! 



What is the result of all this prosperity ? Just what you would ex- 

 pect, if you were looking to prove its existence by its fruits. Outside of 

 the haunts of vice in our large cities — even here vice will bear its own 

 crop — where do you see rags or want ? Who seeks work, that is fit to 

 work, and cannot find it? Where are the wages of labor so high, and 

 so promptly paid, and in currency so unalloyed and undebased ? Where 

 else is every human being so well fed, clothed and housed ? Wher'e else 

 is the ring of coin heard in every pocket, as it is here ? I hazard nothing 

 in the assertion that there are five persons in California, in proportion 

 to the whole, in what we unjustly call the humble walks of life, that are 

 worth five to twenty thousand dollars each, to one in any other com- 

 munity upon which the sun shines. This universal diffusion of inde- 

 pendence, what an anchor and safeguard it is to auy people ! 



