CELEBRATION OF THE FOURTEENTH ANNIVER SARY OF THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA INTO THE UNION by REV. HENRY V. BELLOWS., FRANK BRET HARTE (mobi reader .txt) 📖
- Author: REV. HENRY V. BELLOWS., FRANK BRET HARTE
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I am profoundly impressed with the enormous amount of
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.
CELEBRATION OF THE FOURTEENTH ANNIVER SARY OF THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA INTO THE UNION Pg 9
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.
Next to quantity of labor already done in California, I
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.
CELEBRATION OF THE FOURTEENTH ANNIVER SARY OF THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA INTO THE UNION Pg 10Before quitting this point let me say
16 ORATION.
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.
CELEBRATION OF THE FOURTEENTH ANNIVER SARY OF THE ADMISSION OF CALIFORNIA INTO THE UNION Pg 11
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
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