Excerpt from Annual Address Delivered Before the State Agricultural Society of California: In the Pavilion at Sacramento, September 18, 1890

Mr. President and Gentlemen of the State Board of Agriculture:

The invitation to deliver the annual address before your honorable body, received at the hands of your honored President, plainly indicated the questions you desired should be discussed before you. In addition to the indication of the letter of invitation, your President has taken the very proper precaution of discussing: with me personally the matters, to which your attention should be called, and the general theme, to which the modest merit of this effort should be addressed.

The annual exhibitions of the State Agricultural Society are designed to be illustrative of the progress of agriculture, horticulture and the mechanic arts in our State. These exhibitions are in the highest sense an epitome of State progress. The inventions of the mind, the work of the hands and the intelligent direction of nature in the production of the objects of human desire, are presented annually for the instruction and the thoughtful consideration of our people. This is the theater of the pride of industry. Here useful toil is crowned with honor, and by that crowning, labor is dignified and ennobled. For thirty-eight years these exhibitions have been held, each exhibition a leaf in the history of the progress of our State. But thirty-eight years is scarcely a yesterday in the history of states and nations. More than this, it is scarcely a noon to the morning of to-day. But, notwithstanding the brevity of time which has elapsed since the foundations of our State were laid, startling contrasts and gratifying comparisons would be disclosed if only the first annual exhibition of this society could be placed side by side with that of to-day.

You need not be told that the American settlement of California was induced by an ardent and expectant search for gold, but when measuring the progress California has made in field culture, you do need to be reminded that its first occupants and inhabitants had no faith in its agricultural resources. Men are naturally intolerant as to the differences they encounter between the countries with which they are familiar and those they casually visit. Moreover, men in seeking new homes, seek those where the industries they have pursued in the old are the standards of industry in the new. Of the truth of this, every individual has a witness in his own mind. We are not attracted to the countries whose objects of culture are wholly unfamiliar to us.

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