STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 269 



tural industry — grain growing, stock raising, vine culture, and rearing 

 the silkworm — can successfully be blended together and practiced in the 

 same district, skilled and willing labor can find an abundant field, with 

 continuous employment, at remunerative wages the year round. Let 

 this fact be known to the world, and this alone will do more to encourage 

 and induce immigration hither than any proposed expensive scheme of 

 "Immigrant Aid Societies," with State appropriations, which, at best, 

 will go no farther than to pay the travelling expenses of the immigrant 

 to our State, and then leave him destitute, a stranger in a strange land, 

 with no branch of industry provided for him wherein he may labor and 

 acquire the necessaries of life. 



A large portion of California, in its present condition, is neither useful 

 nor ornamental, bearing no green trees, and yielding no pasture for 

 grazing purposes; yet, how valuable and ornamental could nearly the 

 whole — of what is to-day, so unseemly — be made, by planting vines and 

 fruit trees. 



Meteorologists tell us, that by planting trees and shading the dry 

 ground, the moisture of the atmosphere is increased and more rain pro- 

 duced ; and surely California, with her long, dry, torrid summers, needs 

 all the advantages which would accrue from having her barren lands 

 cultivated and her hillsides covered with verdure, thus increasing the 

 supply of rain, and materially benefiting the grain grower and grazer. 



The vine, even when growing upon the thin, and almost arid soil of 

 the mountain slopes, does not suffer from drought, as do the grain crops 

 of the valleys below; indeed, it is to the vinej'ards, upon these other- 

 wise barren and desolate hillsides, that we must look for our most deli- 

 cate and finest flavored wines and brandies. Neither does the cultivation 

 of the grape exhaust the soil as the cereals do; there are vineyards in 

 Los Angeles said to be one hundred years old, which still bear full crops 

 every year. 



Much of the soil of California is onl}- suitable to the growing of fruits. 

 In order to make fruit growing a success, it is necessary to grow all of 

 the various varieties to which our soil and climate may be adapted; the 

 most important of which, for general culture, is the grape, of its various 

 kinds. Nor can fruit growing be made a success without, to some 

 extent, using the still, as there is always a considerable portion of the 

 crop that must be distilled, or suffered to go entirely to waste. 



In order to get our people to plant vines, and enter with spirit into 

 the development of this leading interest of California, the General Gov- 

 ernment must be induced to pursue a different policy toward the grape 

 interest from that which at present prevails; it must call away from the 

 vine grower the lynx-eyed Tax Collector, with his red tape snares, ever 

 ready to pounce upon the unwary and seize and confiscate, not only the 

 still and machinery, and crop on hand, but even the land whereon the 

 still stands, and the house wherein it is located (even though it be the 

 homestead), and all this because of some technical violation of a law, so 

 obscure in its meaning and so conflicting in its provisions as to be beyond 

 the ordinary comprehension of the humble wine-maker, and which even 

 the Government official himself, who makes the seizure, cannot intelli- 

 gibly explain. 



The presence of a vineyard greatly adorns and beautifies the surround- 

 ings of the homestead, giving it a bright and cheerful aspect, which 

 yields a continual feast of beauty for the eye, and fills the heart with a 

 sense of quiet happiness and content, strengthening the love of home 

 and the simple enjoyments of rural life. 



