PROCEEDINGS OP THIRTY-THIRD FRUIT-GROWERS ' CONVENTION. 57 



on this State. On the other hand, it was continually of economic and 

 industrial benefit to California. (Applause.) 



I believe, as an observer of the situation, that the entire fruit industry 

 of this State is founded, not upon the cheapness, but upon the fidelity 

 and reliability of Chinese labor. You have got to have reliable labor 

 to save your perishable property. Then, as the labor is non-competi- 

 tive, does not compete with white labor, takes that which white labor 

 rejects, why should not your rural land-owner and producer be per- 

 mitted to have that kind of labor? (Applause.) Why should labor, 

 in itself alien and under alien leadership, in our cities, be permitted 

 to dictate to politicians of California what their policy shall be toward 

 the rural producer? (Applause.) Has the rural producer no rights 

 which Tveitmoe and Furuseth and McCarthy and Cornelius and Casey 

 are bound to respect ? You are not interfering with the labor situation 

 in San Francisco or other large cities of this State. You are not dic- 

 tating to employers who they shall have in their employ. You are 

 not interfering with the laboring people of those large cities at all ; but 

 you, on your ranches, in your orchards and vineyards and fields, are 

 building San Francisco ; you are building every city in this State. You 

 are adding every dollar of value that is added to its real estate; you 

 are adding to its banking facilities. You are doing it all because if 

 you withdraw the rural production of these vast fields and orchards 

 and vineyards of California the cities of this State shrivel up like a 

 scroll of thin paper in the fire. It is your production that sustains 

 them. fEvery city built in this State purpled first in the vineyard and 

 reddened in the orchard and was made golden in the fields of Cali- 

 fornia before it rose as a city. Then why should you be dictated to, 

 as you stand as the foundation of the industries and the business and 

 the prosperity of this State? Why should you be dictated to by the 

 people who live in these cities which your enterprise has created? Why 

 should you not stand up independently and say, "We require, in the 

 primary processes of our production, which lie at the foundation of 

 California's prosperity, this form of labor, and, by the Eternal, that 

 form of labor we will have!" (Great applause.) 



Now, you have seen the result of the Chinese exclusion law. Eco- 

 nomic law will have its way. It moves as resistlessly as a glacier. Fol- 

 lowing the exclusion of the Chinese and the rapid diminution in the 

 number of that labor, there has been introduced here to take its place 

 every form of labor that is less desirable, and in some instances 

 enormously less desirable than the Chinese labor. (Applause.) You 

 are getting southeastern Europeans here. You know what their habits 

 are. But the theorist rises up and says we should permit only that 

 immigration into the United States which we can assimilate. May God 

 in his infinite mercy look down in all kindness on my descendants who 



