39 2 Presidential Addresses 



dent or else to become props of mighty civilized na 

 tions. The sea-faring merchants ventured with ever 

 greater boldness into the Atlantic. The cities of the 

 Netherlands, the ports of the Hansa, grew and flour 

 ished as once the Italian cities had grown. Holland 

 and England, Spain, Portugal, and France sent forth 

 mercantile adventurers to strive for fame and profit 

 on the high seas. The Cape of Good Hope was 

 doubled, America was discovered, and the Atlantic 

 Ocean became to the greater modern world what the 

 Mediterranean had been to the lesser world of an 

 tiquity. 



Now, men and women of California, in our own 

 day, the greatest of all the seas and the last to be 

 used on a large scale by civilized man bids fair to 

 become in its turn the first in point of importance. 

 The empire that shifted from the Mediterranean will 

 in the lifetime of those now children bid fair to shift 

 once more westward to the Pacific. When the iQth 

 century opened the lonely keels of a few whale ships, 

 a few merchantmen, had begun to furrow the vast 

 expanse of the Pacific; but as a whole its islands 

 and its shores were not materially changed from 

 what they had been in the long past ages when the 

 Phoenician galleys traded in the purple of Tyre, the 

 ivory of Libya, the gold of Cyprus. The junks of 

 the Orient still crept between China and Japan and 

 Farther India ; and from the woody wilderness which 

 shrouded the western shores of our own continent 

 the red lords of the land looked forth upon a waste 

 of waters which only their own canoes traversed. 



