TEACH AS TO FARMING. 31 



shall at least inspire him with a craving for more, and set him on 

 the right track to learn it. And thus tens of thousands are grow- 

 ing up all around us children, perhaps, of ignorance and ineffi- 

 ciency who shall be leaders and guides in the great work to 

 which this Address is a feeble but earnest contribution. 



Hawthorne, in his " Three-Fold Destiny," tells the story of a 

 young man who wandered all the world over in quest of three 

 wonderful incidents, which, it had been predicted, should occur lo 

 him ; and returned disappointed and spirit-broken to find them all 

 under the shadow of his paternal roof. I perceive in this tale, 

 as in every work of true genius, some reflection of a universal 

 fact; an appeal to the general experience and the heart of Hu- 

 manity. How many have chased deluding phantoms through the 

 fervid noontide of life, only to find, as evening shadows drew 

 around them, that Ambition had no goal, Achievement no triumph, 

 to equal the calm, perennial joys of a humble rural home ! 



I commend the moral of Hawthorne's story to our young men, 

 who are from year to year setting forth so bravely to wrench 

 fortune from the golden sands of California, or win her among 

 the young cities that, emulating the growth of Jonah's gourd, are 

 beginning to dot the American shores of the great Pacific. Far 

 be it from me to insinuate that their venture is a wild one, and 

 their hopes necessarily doomed to ultimely blight. I have faith 

 in American energy ; still more in sturdy, persistent, intelligent 

 Industry ; and I feel sure that a clime so genial, a country so 

 diversified in its natural features, a soil so deep and virgin, as 

 those of California, must proffer many inducements to the hardy, 

 resolute pioneer, even though that soil be here and there sprin- 

 kled with gold. Such an enterprise as the peopling and settling 

 of a country so new and so remote from prior civilization, will, 

 of course, demand its martyrs : in its prosecution thousands will 

 die, and tens of thousands fail ; but the enterprise itself will 

 neither die nor fail ; and many of those who fitly embark in it 

 will achieve, at last, success and competence. What I would say 

 is addressed rather to the tens of thousands whom filial or parental 

 ties retain among us, while they impatiently champ the bit and 



