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developed rate of progress that has no parallel, the whole mighty East 

 has stretched its arms across the continent, and linked itself to us by 

 iron bands. The locomotive, the mightiest civilizer the world ever 

 saw, has ploughed its way hither and asserted its imperial rights, that the 

 strictest constructionists do not question, and against which even free- 

 men do not rebel. Only the man that shall have grown as the next ten 

 years will make him grow, can describe the results that are to follow. 

 You are not large enough to hear them, or I to speak them, here and 

 now; you are not ready for the pagans that should and will be sung to 

 the brave, bold heads and hearts that have done the mighty work. It 

 is Napoleonic in its reach and grasp — it is world lifting in its results. 



This is the California that is our home. Are we equal to it ? A new 

 era is about to dawn upon us ; an era of bolder conception and wider 

 grasp than anything we have known before. The world is levelling up. 

 Great men are only those who tower above their fellows, and it is at 

 once a paradox and a fact, that where all are great none are. A com- 

 merce such as the world has never know invites us to develop it. Five 

 hundred millions of Orientals, with the accumulated wealth of centuries, 

 are looking us in the face across the Pacific, ready to let us teach them 

 wants and supply them also. And that glorious old ocean, that rolls in 

 placid majesty at our feet, is itself the type of the future in which this 

 new nation is to finish and perfect the empire, that has ever kept its 

 westward way through all the ages. Its star stopped and rested when 

 it reached the Pacific. The largest, the safest, the most variegated, the 

 most beautiful — well might the world's progress be checked and rolled 

 back as it reached these shores. 



This occasion furnishes the opportunity to all the world to see Cali- 

 fornia as she is. She needs and asks nothing more. Her varied and 

 matchless climate, her exhaustless resources, her grand possibilities, her 

 ambitious and energetic people, all speak for themselves, and they must 

 be both blind and deaf who do not see the signs and hear the tones that 

 px'ecede aud announce the coming glory. 



It is for us to be ready. The one great drawback to the growth of 

 California to-da} r is that her children were not born here. They learned 

 their ideas and formed their habits in other and narrower regions, where 

 the winter's cold pinched and the summer's sun wilted them — where 

 thought ran in grooves of traditional or sectional prejudices, and where 

 the shadow of old institutions, reflected across the Atlantic, kept up the 

 delusion that men can be great by birth, by accident, or by association, 

 rather than by that only mode — the greatness in their own souls. Hence, 

 California is tq them a novelty and a wonder, and they do not become 

 so accustomed to the marvels that they daily see as to quite overcome 

 the doubt that earlier and different associations suggest. When she shall 

 have blood relations in all her children the world will be taught to see 

 her and know her as she is. This is " California's opportunity" to extend 

 the knowledge of her great resources and prosperity, and to demjfcstrate 

 that they rest upon so firm a basis that they are not to be impaired or 

 diminished in the future. Let us make the most of it. 



