And die, like them, of unbelief in God and wrong of man.”
That California has the material resources to make her not merely one of the first, but the very first, of the states of the Union, no one can doubt; but the fostering care of the general government, and the exertion of all the energies of our own people will be required to develop those resources and make our state what it is capable of becoming. I have dreamed of the time when that great highway of commerce around the Cape of Good Hope, opened to the world by the Portuguese navigators of the fifteenth century, should be abandoned, and long caravans of merchant ships, treading the desert ocean that lies at our west, should bring to our wharves the merchandise of China and the Indies, and give to us the profits of that vast trade which has built so many of the cities of Europe and of Asia; when along the great Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, from San Francisco to St. Louis, and from St. Louis to the Atlantic seaboard, the transit of this wealth of the world, like a turbid stream turned through our miners’ sluice-boxes, should everywhere deposit gold as it passed. If California and the general government shall ever be aroused upon this subject, and this great railway—the mightiest in its results of any enterprise ever projected by man—shall be completed, a revolution will be accomplished in our state, the marvels of which will be second only to those that accompanied our first settlement of the territory. Our population, no longer stinted to a few hundred thousand, will suddenly be counted by millions. Every valley will be fat with grain, and the yellow harvest will wave on every hillside. The hamlets will rise to villages, the villages to towns, and the towns to regal cities. Like the redwoods of our mountains, the masts of the vessels of all nations will be forests in our ports, and the white sails in the offing shall flock together as white doves when they come home to their nests. Then, capital will seek investment among us, and enterprise and industry will add wealth to wealth. Then will the hidden riches of the mines be explored, and larger and more secure investments afford a profit that now is hardly dreamed of. Every resource of the state will be developed, and California will become the mistress of the Pacific, rivaling not merely the richest commercial states of our own confederacy, but the most powerful maritime nations that sit by the shores of the Atlantic.
Such California once was; such California yet may be. You, pioneers, who meet to-day to celebrate the eighth anniversary of her admission as a state of the Union,—you, and those whom you represent, are the founders of this new commonwealth, and on the direction you give her institutions and her enterprise her destiny for good or evil will depend.
I congratulate you, Pioneers of California, on the proud position you occupy.
“You are living, you are dwelling,
In a grand and awful time,
In an age on ages telling,
To be living is sublime.”
You are presiding at the birth of a nation; you shape its destinies and mold its future according to your own will. Your works will speak for you in the coming ages. If you make California glorious, you will be immortal; if you make her base and vile, she will return her shame on your own heads.
It was my lot, in 1848, to witness the Revolution that overturned the throne of France, and drove Louis Philippe into exile, and I thought it the fortune of a lifetime to be present at the downfall of a great government. But how much more is the blood of ambition stirred by the creation of an empire,—of an empire that for centuries to come is to sit the undisputed mistress of these vast seas that spread themselves at our feet!