SAN DIEGO: by Kenneth Morris
THAT San Diego has the greatest of futures before it, who shall deny? Katherine Tingley, Leader of The Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society, foresaw its destiny, saw its possibilities, fifteen years ago, and began forthwith to lay the foundations of peculiar greatness for it. There are thousands of cities in the United States, doubtless in Canada too, centers in all the new worlds established from Europe, that have before them a huge metropolitanism, and are to grow populous beyond the Old World capitals. Why not? The wind of increase bloweth where it listeth, and we can only safely prophesy change and reversion, change and reversion. Where the deserts are now, dwelt of old the builders of sky-scrapers; aeroplanes soared over lands the oceans cover; and Dreadnoughts floated and made war, perhaps, where now are Alps and Andes. Here is a land in its beginnings; many millennia lie before it in which to grow. We need the grand vision when we look out on the ages to be; only so can we sow the right seeds for their harvesting. We cannot tell what nations or cities are destined for high material greatness; probably there is room for every one to hope. But for San Diego a peculiar and more excellent fate is reserved, whose falling she may hasten by her clear-sightedness, or retard by her perversity; still, it lies before her. She is to be the City of Righteousness, the metropolis of the world's culture, the Mecca of distant generations of poets, artists, philosophers, and musicians. It is not mainly her own citizens who make this claim. They, with all their high ambitions, with all their golden dreams, are hardly alive to the great possibilities of the town.
In an age pre-eminently of material progress, it is natural to lay most stress on the material advantages of site, climate, etc. So there is no end to the writing on the Bay—the one bay between San Francisco and somewhere far away in Mexico—with all it offers for commerce and for strategy; or on the unwearying efforts of the sun; on the glorious hinterland, so rich and beautiful; or the new railway that is to open it up, and link San Diego with the east; on partial awakenings at Washington to the great strategic importance of this town, and the certainty that these partial awakenings must become whole-hearted and thorough some time, and bear fruit a thousandfold. Time, time, time—there is time for all these things. Innumerable palaces will be seen, surrounding this blue jewel of a bay; looking down on it from amidst exquisite parks and gardens on the heights; there will be drives as famed as any in Switzerland or Italy. Nature herself has provided for this; and the tide of empire is rolling westward.
Lomaland Photo. and Engraving Dept.
VIEW OF SAN DIEGO WITH A GLIMPSE OF THE BAY
CORONADO IN THE DISTANCE
Lomaland Photo. and Engraving Dept.
THE U. S. GRANT HOTEL, FROM THE PLAZA, SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
Time and again San Diego has been named with two cities of the Old World; and there is something instructive in either comparison. She is "the Naples of California," and again, "the Athens of the Pacific Coast." Cuyamaca has been likened to Vesuvius, and our bay to the Bay of Naples. Indeed, no doubt there is a physical resemblance. The conditions that made Naples are largely historic; but then they are largely climatic, and matters of situation, also. As for history, the history of San Diego lies before her. All historic conditions—Camorra, lazzaroni, plague, pestilence, national inefficiency, vice, and famine, or the blessings which are the reverse of all these—are the fruitage of one cannot say what tiny seeds sown, one cannot say when or how often. You take a child, and give it no training or bad training in its first years: it was the offspring of highly cultured parents, perhaps; but what disasters may not lie before it? On the other hand, you take a child, who has had no advantages, and give it a Râja Yoga training such as Katherine Tingley is giving to so many at Point Loma and elsewhere—such, in truth, as only Katherine Tingley knows how to give—and you need set no particular limits to the hopes you hold for that child's future. There is a great parallelism with this in the early years of a city or community.
Up and down the world there are a thousand cities, as was said, with huge material destinies lying before them, which by their very situation they will not be able to escape. But in how many cases have they not been without far foresight in their youth, to guard them against the perils of that most perilous time? "They sow their wild oats," we say; a phrase that is meant to cover a multitude of iniquities. One can no more cheat the Law with such an excusive expression, than one can write an I O U for one's debts, and comfortably thank God that one need think no more of them. He who has sown his wild oats may have gained a certain wisdom and experience out of the sufferings resultant from them; but he will never be the man he might have been. He will have lowered the whole of his possibilities, and can pay thereafter only so much per cent of his debt to the world and humanity.
Climate and situation might have prepared for San Diego only such a fate as that of Naples; and there are other elements of possible danger as well, which it would require no ordinary wisdom and foresight to guard against. Indeed, have there not been revelations here and there in our cities, which should make us judge charitably the home of the Camorra? But now there are many thousands up and down the world who believe in San Diego; who cannot think she will fail or fall into gross error; who already look on her as a Mecca for their hopes; who know that she will shed light around the world. Reference is made, of course, to the great membership of the Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society, which has its ramifications among all the peoples of the globe. For them, San Diego rose above the horizon when Katherine Tingley declared her intention, some fifteen years ago, to found the City of Learning, the World's Theosophical Headquarters, on the heights of Point Loma, within the city limits of San Diego. They had reason even then to know that what Katherine Tingley says she will do, is done; and they have had a million times more reason for that certainty given them since.
When this famous humanitarian came to San Diego, grass was growing in some of the streets there, where there should have been boulevards bustling with life. The old first "boom" had long since spent itself, helped to its grave by ready inimical hands; and there seemed no special reason for its resurrection. It was then that she made her promises. This little city of the quiet streets should come to be, not the Naples, but the Athens of the west. It should have population; it should have riches and commerce and splendor; it should flourish abundantly when its enemies had long since faded out and been forgotten; and all this was the very least and most insignificant part of its destiny. There should be a new and timelong age of Perikles here; new Phidian studios; new Groves of Akademe. Time—we must not be niggardly with that, perhaps; these things should not be in a day; but assuredly they should be.
It will be asked, on what grounds Katherine Tingley based these promises of hers. The answer is: on her own intentions with regard to the place; and on her knowledge of the laws that govern the growth of civic and national life. Is there no knowing the future? The farmer sows his seed under the impression that there is. He has cultivated the soil; plowed and fertilized it; now he can put the seed in with a certain confidence. Only it is not everybody that understands the preparing for these greater national or civic harvests.
It is safe to say that from that time the second great San Diego boom dates. The Theosophical Center was started on Point Loma, and from the first has been attracting life to the city across the bay. This is not the place to give statistics as to the number of thousands of dollars that have been spent in San Diego each year; nor as to the amount of labor that has been employed. From the start it was enough to give the city that new impetus of life which was needed—a fact proven by the rise in the population from 17,000 to 50,000 in ten years.
Then came the founding of the Râja Yoga system of education, with its first and chiefest exemplification in the College on Point Loma. Do all our citizens realize what this has meant for the city? On merely material lines, for example? Not only from the eastern States, but from Europe and Asia as well, hundreds have made the pilgrimage to San Diego to investigate the Râja Yoga College and system on the Point. They have gone away and filled their own lands with the rumor of the fame of this wonderful new thing that has its Headquarters—at San Diego. The press of England, of Japan, of Germany, of Holland, of Sweden, have been made abundantly aware of the fame of this Theosophical Center—at San Diego. A Greek play is given in the open-air theater on Point Loma, San Diego—and we read critiques of it in the morning papers of Bavaria. We pick up a Tokyo magazine of current date, and find in it a picture of a group of children who are receiving their education at Point Loma, San Diego. Katherine Tingley landed in Liverpool in the summer of 1907; and the next morning's London papers teemed with accounts of her—pages of accounts of her—and of her colossal and beneficent undertaking at Point Loma, San Diego. And so on, and so on, and so on. With the best facilities in the world and a genius for advertising, and with the expenditure of millions, San Diego could hardly have advertised herself in the way that Mrs. Tingley, through her Theosophical work, has caused her to be advertised; and it has cost San Diego nothing.
But all this has been merely, or mainly, for the material advantage of the city. A man (or a place) may acquire a false fame, that he cannot or will not live up to; and he will be paid with contempt later, more oppressive than the obscurity he had at first. Mrs. Tingley has done more than this. She has laid down the lines, and labored without ceasing, for the real advance and benefit of the city. Is it nothing that San Diego should have in its core a Center such as this Theosophical one at Point Loma—a center where the higher life is being lived, where money is not the motive, where the greatest effort of the age is being made to uplift humanity? The greatest effort? Yes; because the one that knows best what must be done to attain success, and on what foundations in the nature of man this success must be based.
Consider her fame throughout the world; her fame as an orator, that will crowd the biggest halls in any city in Europe, and bring hundreds to the doors who cannot gain admission. There may be some other living Americans of whom as much can be said; but there are not many. How many visitors are attracted to San Diego yearly by Katherine Tingley's famous work at Point Loma, and because this world-renowned orator will certainly be speaking at the Isis Theater twice or three times, or perhaps more often, in each season? And what will be the result of these many speeches of hers, that so many thousands have heard?
The result may not be so visible yet that "he who runs may read"; neither is the result of the great fertilizing you gave your field—until the grain has sprouted, and the brown earth is covered with greenness. But the result is that seeds of coming greatness, in a real sense—seeds of a higher, cleaner, saner life—have been sown in the life and thought of the city. In time you shall see the harvest. It will be a clean city, such as Calvin, for example, strove to make of his Geneva; a city without stain or blemish, without saloon or redlight. Beyond that, it will be a city perhaps of many theaters, in which the highest, the most classical and beautiful of the world's dramas will be shown—and in which there will never be anything shown approaching the commonplace, the vulgar, the stupid. It will be a City Beautiful, a place of marvelous architecture, exquisite gardening. It will be a city whose press will be clean, elevating, unsensational, instructive; a press that will not lie nor slander nor touch personal themes; that will give the news, and not rake hell and the gutters, fact and fancy, for all kinds of nauseousness and nonsense; a press that will be a model to the press of the world. From all the world the best people will be sending their children to be educated here.
There is no limit to the high possibilities of San Diego—the high possibilities that Katherine Tingley has helped to make possible. How long, O San Diego, before these things shall be? It is for you to answer; it is for you to answer.