TWENTY-MNTH FRUIT-GROWERs' CON^'EXTIOX. 



87 



California, as did the Pioneers, to gather up the gold that called them 

 hither, intended only to spend a few months here amid the wastes and 

 deserts of an inhospitable territory, and then, enriched by what they 

 found, go back to live in peace and luxury amid the torrid summers* 

 heat and killing winters" cold that beat upon the States from whence 

 they came ? To them the summer's drought, the brown hills, the 

 parched valleys, the dry creeks, the long months of rainless sunshine, 

 preached eloquent sermons and corroborated the pessimistic views of 

 him whose giant intellect o'ershadowed all who sat with him within the 

 Nation's Senate chamber. No wonder, then, that he who sought to set 

 the plow to California's fallow acres and scatter seed upon its barren 

 fields was looked upon by the hardy sons of other climes as worthy of 

 the jibes and jests so freely showered on him. No wonder that your 

 earliest predecessors were scoffed at and held up to ridicule by those 

 whose only notion of California was that of El Dorado, to be quickly 

 robbed of all its treasures and then abandoned to the desolation that 

 had been and must forever after be its only heritage. And yet they 

 persevered, those stubborn men who loved the soil and were not dashed 

 by prophecies of certain failure. They looked upon the small attempts 

 at agriculture, horticulture, and viticulture that the ascetic padres of 

 the Missions had unconsciously set them for their lessons: they found 

 that all the cereals, planted in our virgin soil, sprung forth to greet the 

 winter's fructifying showers, and warmed and hastened by our genial 

 springtime sun, returned an hundred and a thousand fold to him who 

 trusted nature wholly: they put the vine and the fruit tree in tlie 

 goodly soil, and saw such growth as made their doubting comrades open 

 wide their eyes in wonder: they found that, where so many failed in 

 finding gold enough to satisfy their greed and need, no failure came to 

 him who. with a reasoning care, trusted all his future fortune to 

 Pomona, Ceres, and Bacchus: they found, in short, that of Cahfornia's 

 100.000.000 acres there were over 30,000,000 as productive and as fat 

 as any others that could be boasted of by any other land or people. 

 Where, then, are all the prophets of evil who were so free to class Cali- 

 fornia with desert and with wastes ? Where, then, are those who would 

 have had this nation refuse to accept from Mexico this land, greater in 

 extent than all Xew England, with forests such as compel the wonder 

 of all who are fortunate enough to behold them, with a mineral wealth 

 that, in the nation's hour of greatest need, supplied the wherewithal 

 that kept her credit good and preserved us all a nation one and indis- 

 soluble, and with a soil that, hardly yet one-tenth occupied, supports in 

 comfort and luxury a million and three-quarters of happy and con- 

 tented people ? 



Of southern California. Webster said: "Gentlemen will please to 

 remember that, in that part of California, eight months of every year 



