14 Life and Sport on the Pacific Slope 



talk, he said to me, feverishly : " Say, what ails 

 California ? " 



I told him that, in my humble opinion, the hard 

 times were over, that the future was rosy with the 

 blush, not the flush, of returning health, and that 

 California would be richer and stronger and wiser 

 than she had ever been before. My friend's expres- 

 sive face brightened. 



" The State is all right," he replied earnestly. 

 " The trouble lies with us. We 've had a bad dose 

 of the swelled head. And now," he added mourn- 

 fully, " we 've got cold feet." 



In the slang that comes so pat to the lips of a 

 Western man, he had said — everything. 



When California begins to laugh again, the world 

 will laugh with her. She is smiling already. The 

 discovery of gold in the tributaries of the Yukon, the 

 opening up of Alaska, the acquisition of the Philip- 

 pine Islands, railroad competition, the Oriental trade, 

 the possibilities that encompass the cutting of a 

 canal across the Isthmus of Panama,^ and the com- 

 pletion of the Trans-Siberian Eailway, the discover- 

 ies of coal fields and oil wells, these — to name only 

 a few — are the heralds of a progress and prosperity 

 that must prove radical and enduring.^ 



1 Since writing the above the Panama Canal has become the 

 property of American capitalists. 



2 The Hon. John Barrett, late United States Minister to Siam, 

 writes : " Three great States, California, Oregon, and Washington, 

 forging ahead in material strength with tremendous strides, de- 

 veloping vast resources, increasing rapidly in population, and pos- 

 sessing mighty potentialities yet to be exploited, debouch with 

 their entire western boundaries upon the Pacific, and look to it for 



