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.