APPROACHES TO THE PACIFIC COAST 

 to be reached only by dint of extraordinary efforts; 

 and the present routes hither have been created by 

 engineering works of unprecedented magnitude. 

 The land is remote, and for the maintenance of 

 connections, even with the country of which 

 politically it forms a part, all the mechanical re- 

 sources of western civilization are necessary. Once 

 here, moreover, the man of European descent finds 

 himself looking out upon an alien and incompre- 

 hensible Asia. So the dominating consideration in 

 the affairs of the Pacific Coast is that here a de- 

 tached outpost of European civilization finds itself 

 face to face, in perpetuity, with the Orient. It is 

 unnecessary to dwell upon the fact that from the 

 point of view of anthropogeography the coasts of 

 the Pacific Asiatic and American constitute a 

 unit. The seas unite, the land masses separate, men. 

 Here before us lies the ocean, easily traversed; 

 there behind us rises the great mountain barrier, 

 threaded only by occasional passes, separating us 

 from the eastern part of the continent. Considered 

 in terms of humanity at large, the situation is arti- 

 ficial; we close an avenue in the face of millions, 

 and open a path by which only tens arrive. The 

 significance of this anomaly is unmistakable: Euro- 

 peans, having by their daring and alertness won 

 a title to a coast which would seem to be the natural 

 area for the overflow of Asia, propose to hold it 

 as the frontier of their own civilization. The su- 

 preme difficulty of this attempt should not be under- 

 estimated. The ingenuity of the European has 

 abridged distances by means of railroads and 

 canals, and so has made his position here seem- 

 ingly tenable. On the other hand, his inventiveness 

 has placed steamships at the disposal of his com- 

 petitors, and, while the land on this side remains 

 unfilled, the millions in Asia do not decrease. 



It is obvious that the study of history inevitably 

 forces upon us a realization of the circumstances 

 in which European man finds himself placed when 

 he undertakes to hold the western border of the 

 Pacific Ocean; but history itself does not seek to 

 elucidate the future; it takes account only of the 

 steps by which the present situation has come to 

 be as it is. From the point of view of the history 

 of occidental peoples, the juxtaposition of west 

 and east upon the Pacific is the outcome of the 

 hardihood and adventurous spirit of successive 

 generations of European seafarers and frontiers- 

 men. 



In whichever direction one looks out from 

 Europe, California lies beyond an ocean and a conti- 



3 



