CELEBRATION OF THE FOURTEENTH ANNIVER SARY OF THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA INTO THE UNION by REV. HENRY V. BELLOWS., FRANK BRET HARTE (paper ebook reader TXT) 📕

bodily labor of which your State has been the scene. Not

only in the prodigious leveling of the hills to make the ground

of your commercial capital a leveling so much to be deplored;

since their terracing, in place of this awfully scarred, and,

from the water, most repulsive view of your city, would have

given you something such a charming and finished aspect as

Sydney wears but in the numerous and magnificent roads that

cross your mountains all the way from Los Angeles to Siski-

you, and from your Bay to the Carson River. When and

where, at your costly rates of labor came the hands that built

these almost trans-Alpine roads ? Perhaps, however, the

enormous tolls they gather in might suggest an answer, and I

had myself a glimpse of the truth, after driving in a private

carriage about Nevada Territory, for a week, where the inter

vals between the toll-gates hardly gave my host time to button

up his pocket, and suggested the idea of a machine to be

attached to the carriage that should regularly drop a dollar

in the road every five minutes, without trouble to the driver !

Consider, too, a State whose hills and mountains have been

hydraulicked and run off in sluices until the skipping of the

hills like rams becomes a prosaic statement, for they run like

14 ORATION.

fawns, and very much of their tawny color ! Your river

courses have been turned often enough to bury ten thousand

Alarics in their beds, and you have dug up their bottoms till

they refuse any more to show them. What gulch, or hollow

has escaped your picks and spades ? Your road-sides look as

if some vast contractor has just brought together the materials,

the stone and the gravel, for paving a thousand miles of way, and

having received his pay, had considered the job finished, tho'

the road was not. You have turned over the soil of Califor

nia till it looks as if it never would lie easy again ! If ever

an ugly demon of scarification had his wanton way in defacing

the natural beauty of a country, name him "Placer Diggings,

Esq." Why, the desolations of Quartz-Mining, laborious as

that vast business is, leaving great cities on a crust of subter

raneous emptiness, and burying more timber in their shoring

up, as is said of Virginia City, than there is built into the

town alone with all their gigantic tunnels and galleries, are

beauty itself compared with the surface mining ! One hears

with a kind of pitying relief for the poor earth, that the

Placer Diggings are giving out, and that some chance is now

open for the unvindictive fingers of nature, to bandage these

wounds with the grasses of the spring, to balsam them with

dew and rain, and efface the scars that cupidity made, with the

generous oblivion of her summer verdure.

If, to mining toil,

we add the immense ditching which make the hydraulic labor

and skill of the interior and the foot-hills, a ceaseless wonder ;

the fencing of fields ; the erection of homes for 600,000 people

with all the work exhibited in the great City of San Francisco

in its vast and admirable Hotels, large and beautiful Churches,

noble and costly stores, numerous, tasteful and permanent

homes, ( I wish I could add substantial wharves,) we have an

amount of physical labor represented here such as I doubt if

any thing in history, space and time being considered, can

equal, if it be not the amount of bodily toil sustained by our

armies, in the earth-works, rifle-pits and fortifications, to which

they have bent their noble limbs, to an extent utterly unknown

to any who have not followed them through the whole three

and a half years of the war.

ORATION.

have been impressed with the high quality of the domestic pro-

duets of the State, the Minerva finish with which the young arts

and industries spring into life from the teeming brain of your

Olympian civilization. Your blankets, and woolen fabrics,

your cutlery, your harness and saddlery, your glass, your

macaroni, your flour, your iron castings, your machinery, your

house carpentry, your extemporized buildings all indicate a

standard of aspiration, which is to be satisfied only with the

last degree of excellence. California seems to have adopted

for a mo:to, the quizzical saying of a New England farmer, I

once knew " The best is good enough for me." The present

exhibition of the Mechanics Institute, has struck me with more

surprise and animated me with more buoyant hopes of this

State, than the most flattering array of ores, or the moi-t

splendid show of gold and silver. The multiplicity, variety

and vigor of mechanical labor, the number and complexity of

industrial arts, is the true test of a people's capacity for a high

civilization. A monotonous industry even more than her

slavery, which however produced it, was the ruin of the South

ern States. The labors they despised, the humble arts they left

other States to cultivate for them, were the neglected condi

tions of their own real prosperity. The wealth of a State is the

mind of its people, and that mind only a varied industry can

develop, or save from torpor, monotony, superstition, and en

slavement. It is as important to the moral and intellectual edu

cation, as to the external prosperity of a state (and they always

really go together) to possess a varied industry. California,

great as her agricultural, great as her mining interests are, is ev

idently destined to be also a manufacturing State. This city

from the scarcity of coal at any point not reached by water,

and from its solitary harbor, must be the chief seat of your

manufactures ; and it does not surprise me to see it grow at

the apparent expense of all the other towns in the state. Its

growth is not unnatural. It is alike, the New York, the

Chicago and the Lowell of the Pacific slope, uniting the treble

advantages of the commercial depot, the granary, and the

workshop of the coast. 

Before quitting this point let me say

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that the Fair building which has so suddenly lifted its tower

ing diadem in the heart of the city, its graceful dome, a bub

ble of redwood, which it was a sin to rob by covering of its

exquisite glow of native color, is by far the most elegant and

ambitious temporary building I have ever seen. No city but

San Francisco would erect for a Mechanic's Fair such a costly

yet ephemeral palace of Mechanic Arts and for pregnancy

of suggestion, promise of the future, and evidence of present

condition, I should point with more pride as a Californian, to

that exhibition, then to the 700 millions of gold and silver taken

out of your soil or the 700 billions still remaining in it. I will

say nothing of the great Sanitary Cheese, where the milk of five

hundred cows for three days and a half, lies curded and pressed

in a form in which if the fabled frog that should have been a

mouse had swelled to the size of the ox he emulated, he might

still have hid away his bulky proportions but the whole display

of fruits, especially of grapes, and of mechanical products, in

cluding the First Carpet, has sustained most abundantly my

idea that QUALITY distinguishes the California taste as much as

quantity. But need one do more than walk up and down your

main or even your cross streets,to see that the California market

tolerates no mediocrity 1 What splendid and costly stuffs adorn

your shop-windows ! Do any population in the world boot and

shoe themselves, dress themselves, hat themselves, glove them

selves, as well as your population? True ! you pay for it roundly;

but you are willing to pay. I sometimes fear you have adopted in

sober earnest, the jest attributed to a now distinguished histo

rian, who is said to have answered his father's remonstances

against his expensive habits, " Father, I can dispense with the

necessaries of life, bat the luxuries I must have" a jest which

has been reproduced in the concrete by a western lad, who

complained to his Governor, " Father, I can wait for them new

shoes, but I am suffering for a bosom-pin." Still, I cannot but

admire and accept as a good augury ; the love of excellence,

in all fabrics, and in all products, whether material or intel

lectual, which marks this people, " Aut Ccesar aut nullus^

might be inscribed upon its shield ; " the best or none." And

it seems to control the highest and the lowest things, whether

ORATION. 17

it be champagne and cigars, or butter and sugar, or knives and

razors, or blankets and stockings, it is the best that finds the

readiest sale. I hear that sorghum finds its greatest discour

agement here, not in the unfriendliness of the soil or climate,

but in the very natural preference of all the people, high

and low, for sugar to what we boys used to call "long sweet

ing," and of loaf sugar to brown. It is a literal fact that I

have never seen a spoooful of brown sugar on any table, public

or private, in California, and that on meeting it the other day

for the first time, some twenty miles beyond Yreka, I enquired

where I was, and was answered that I had just passed over

the Oregon line.

Let me say, too, that the way-side Inns of

your State, the remotest taverns however unpromising

their exterior, almost uniformly present a cleanly, a bountiful

and