PRESIDENT BID WELL S ADDRESS. 93 



meet as often as necessary to transact business. I take it for granted 

 that you are in earnest and mean business, and if so, you must 

 have a habitation as well as a name. 



Believing this to be absolutely necessary, if you propose to con 

 tinue this State organization in any form whatever, with a capacity 

 for usefulness, I propose to resign my position that you may be 

 free to adopt any plan or measure giving promise of efficiency. 



At this point, it may not be improper to take a view of the situa 

 tion in another direction. Agriculture in California has many ad 

 vantages, but it has also its disadvantages. 



First, } T ou have a soil of wonderful and varied productiveness. 

 No other land teems with fruits and useful products of such raro 

 excellence, and in so great variety and abundance. Look at the 

 cereal capacity of your State. Take for instance wheat bread, the 

 staff of life. If a premium were offered for the smallest yield of 

 wheat in this State on any land timery and properly managed it 

 would be difficult, in my opinion, to establish a smaller showing 

 than ten bushels per acre, in any ordinary or average season, from 

 land chosen by any sane man, up to this date. On the other hand, 

 sixty to seventy bushels per acre are not uncommon; twenty bushels 

 per acre by no means an extravagant average in some sections; and 

 estimating the aggregate product in the United States at three hun 

 dred million of bushels, your total for 1872 gives the enormous pro 

 portion of one twelfth of all the wheat raised in all the States and 

 Territories of this extended and productive country. 



Next, 3 r ou have a climate so serene, salubrious, equable, reliable, 

 and invigorating, that its fame is becoming world-wide; thousands 

 are being attracted hither from the Atlantic sea-board and other 

 countries, from considerations of climate alone. 



You have almost six months of summer sun and cloudless skies 

 to ripen your cereal crops, and give a harvest season, of which the 

 people on the Atlantic side of the continent can have no conception. 



You have another advantage in the lay of the land, and the almost 

 perfect condition of the soil. While in other States and Territories 

 vast outlays from the veiy beginning have been necessary to clear 

 lands of timber, or to drain them because too wet, or to irrigate be 

 cause too dry, or to fertilize because too poor; here in this favored 

 sunny realm the lands cultivated have, with few exceptions, come to 

 you from the hand of nature, ready for immediate use, and all you 

 have had to do was literally &quot;to sow and reap and gather into 

 barns.&quot; 



Nor is this all. The general topography of the grain regions has 

 enabled farmers to introduce with advantage the most approved 

 agricultural implements and machinery. 



You sow grain as well as reap by horse-power; you thresh by 

 steam-power; and you are, many of you at least, looking impatiently 

 to the time in the near future, when you shall be able by steam to 

 stir and pulverize the soil with greater profit than is possible by 

 animal power. 



In addition to the advantages named, your State abounds in 

 mineral, pastoral, and other resources. But I cannot further dwell 

 on the pleasant side of the picture (though in itself inexhaustible), 



