CHAPTER XXIV.

CALIFORNIA.

"In front of San Francisco are 745 millions of hungry Asiatics, who have spices to exchange for meat and grain."

The words are Governor Gilpin's, made use of by him in discussing the future of overland trade, and worthy of notice as showing why it is that, in making forecasts of the future of California, we have to look more to her facilities for trade than to her natural productions. San Francisco aims at being, not so much the port of California as one of the main stations on the Anglo-Saxon highway round the globe.

Although the chief claim of California to consideration is her position on the Pacific, her fertility and size alone entitle her to notice. This single State is 750 miles in length-would stretch from Chamouni to the southernmost point of Malta. There are two capes in California-one nearly in the latitude of Jerusalem, the other nearly in the latitude of Rome. The State has twice the area of Great Britain; the single valley of the Joaquin and Sacramento, from Tulare Lake to the great snowpeak of Shasta, is as large as the three kingdoms. Every useful mineral, every kind of fertile soil, every variety of helpful climate are to be found within the State. There are in the Union fortyfive such states or territories, with an average area equal to that of Britain.

Three great tracts, each with its soil and character, lie between the Pacific and the snows of the Sierra. On the slopes are the forests of giant timber, the sheltered valleys, and the gold-fields in which I spent my first week in California. Next comes the great hot plain of Sacramento, where, with irrigation, all the best fruits of the tropics grow luxuriantly, where water

is plentiful, and the Pacific breeze will raise it to the surface. Round the valley are vast tracts for sheep and wheat, and on the Contra Costas are millions of acres of wild oats growing on the best of lands for cattle, while the slopes are covered with young vines. Between the Contra Costa Range and the sea is a winterless strip possessing for table vegetables and flowers the finest soil and climate in the world. The story goes that Californian boys, when asked if they believe in a future state, reply: "Guess so; California.”

Whether San Francisco will grow to be a second Liverpool or New York is an all-absorbing question to those who live on the Pacific shores, and one not without an interest and a moral for ourselves. New York has waxed rich and huge mainly because she is so placed as to command one of the best harbours on the coast of a country which exports enormously of bread-stuffs. Liverpool has thrived as one of the shipping ports for the manufactures of the northern coal counties of England. San Francisco Bay, as the best harbour south of Puget Sound, is, and will remain, the centre of the export trade of the Pacific States in wool and cereals. If coal is found in plenty in the Golden State, population will increase, manufactures spring up, and the export of wrought articles take the place of that of raw produce. If coal is found in the Contra Costa Range, San Francisco will continue, in spite of earthquakes, to be the foremost port on the Pacific side; if, as is more probable, the find of coal is confined to the Monte Diablo district, and is of trifling value, still the future of San Francisco as the meeting point of the railways, and centre of the import of manufactured goods, and of the export of the produce of an agricultural and pastoral interior, is as certain as it must inevitably be brilliant. Whether the chief town of the Pacific States will in time develop into one of the commercial capitals of the world is a wider and a harder question. That it will be the converging point of the Pacific railroads both of Chicago and St. Louis there can be no doubt. That all the new overland trade from China and Japan will pass through it seems as clear; it is the extent of this trade that is in question. For the moment, land transit cannot compete on equal terms with water carriage; but assuming that, in the long run, this will cease to be the case, it will be the over

land route across Russia, and not that through the United States, that will convey the silks and teas of China to Central and Western Europe. The very arguments of which the Californian merchants make use to show that the delicate goods of China need land transport go to prove that shipping and unshipping in the Pacific, and a repetition in the Atlantic of each process, cannot be good for them. The political importance to America of the Pacific railroads does not admit of over-statement; but the Russian or English Pacific routes must, commercially speaking, win the day. For rare and costly Eastern goods, the English Railway through Southern China, Upper India, the Persian coast, and the Euphrates is no longer now a dream. If Russian bureaucracy takes too long to move, trade will be diverted by the Gulf route; coarser goods and food will long continue to come by sea, but in no case can the city of San Francisco become a western outport of Europe.

The lustre of the future of San Francisco is not dimmed by considerations such as these; as the port of entry for the trade of America with all the East, its wealth must become enormous; and if, as is probable, Japan, New Zealand, and New South Wales grow to be manufacturing communities, San Francisco must needs in time take rank as a second, if not a greater, London. This, however, is the more distant future. With cheaper labour than the Pacific States and the British colonies possess, with a more settled government than Japan-Pennsylvania and Ohio will take, and for years will keep, the China trade. As for the colonies, the voyage from San Francisco to Australia is almost as long and difficult as that from England, and there is every probability that Lancashire and Belgium will continue to supply the colonists with clothes and tools, until they themselves, possessed as they are of coal, become competent to make them. The merchants of San Francisco will be limited in the main to the trade with China and Japan. In this direction the future has no bounds: through California and the Sandwich Islands, through Japan, fast becoming American, and China, the coast of which is already British, our race seems marching westward to universal rule. The Russian empire itself, with all its passive strength, cannot stand against the English horde, ever pushing with burning

energy towards the setting sun. Russia and England are said to be nearing each other upon the Indus; but long before they can meet there, they will be face to face upon the Amoor.

For a time, the flood may be diverted south or north: Mexico will doubtless, and British Columbia will probably, carry off a portion of the thousands who are pouring west from the bleak rocks of New England. The Californian expedition of 1853 against Sonora and Lower California will be repeated with success, but the tide will be but momentarily stayed. entirely are English countries now the mother-lands of energy and adventure throughout the world, that no one who has watched what has happened in California, in British Columbia, and on the west coast of New Zealand, can doubt that the discovery of placer gold-fields in any sea-girt country in the world, must now be followed by the speedy rise there of an English government. We know enough of Chili, and of the new Russian country on the Amoor, to be aware that such discoveries are more than likely to occur.

In the face of facts like these, men are to be found who ask whether a break-up of the Union is not still probable-whether the Pacific States are not likely to secede from the Atlantic; some even contend for the general principle that "America must go to pieces-she is too big." It is small powers, not great ones, that have become impossible: the unification of Germany is in this respect but the dawn of a new era. The great countries of to-day are smaller than were the smallest of a hundred years ago. Lewes was farther from London in 1700 than Edinburgh is now. New York and San Francisco will in 1870 be nearer to each other than Canton and Pekin. From the point of view of mere size, there is more likelihood of England entering the Union than of California seceding from it.

The material interests of the Pacific States will always lie in union. The West, sympathising in the main with the Southerners upon the slavery question, threw herself into the war, and crushed them, because she saw the necessity of keeping her outlets under her own control. The same policy would hold good for the Pacific States in the case of the continental railroad. America, of all countries, alone shares the future of both

Atlantic and Pacific, and she knows her interests too well to allow such an advantage to be thrown away. Uncalculating rebellion of the Pacific States upon some sudden heat, is the only danger to be apprehended, and such a rising could be put down with ease, owing to the manner in which these States are commanded from the sea. Throughout the late rebellion, the Federal navy, though officered almost entirely by Southerners, was loyal to the flag, and it would be so again. In these days, loyalty may be said to be peculiarly the sailor's passion: perhaps he loves his country because he sees so little of it.

California is too British to be typically American: it would seem that nowhere in the United States have we found the true America or the real American. Except as abstractions, they do not exist; it is only by looking carefully at each eccentric and irregular America-at Irish New York, at Puritan New England, at the rowdy South, at the rough and swaggering Far West, at the cosmopolitan Pacific States-that we come to reject the anomalous features, and to find America in the points they possess in common. It is when the country is left that there rises in the mind an image that soars above all local prejudicethat of the America of the law-abiding, mighty people who are imposing English institutions on the world.