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 snow-peak
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 forty-five such States or
Territories, with an average area equal to that of Britain.
Between the Pacific and the snows of the Sierra are three great tracts,
each with its soil and character. On the slopes of the Sierra 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 for irrigation is plentiful, and
the Pacific breeze will raise it. 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.”
[Illustration: EL CAPITAN, YOSEMITE VALLEY.--P. 228.]
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 harbors on the coast of a country which exports enormously of
breadstuffs. 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 harbor south of Puget Sound, is, and will remain, the
center 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 center 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 overland 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 overstatement; 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 outpost of Europe.
The luster 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 become great
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 labor than the Pacific States and the British
colonies possess, with a more settled government than
Japan--Pennsylvania and Ohio, from the time that the Pacific railroad is
completed, 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 Lancaster 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 toward 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. So entirely are English countries now the motherlands 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 on any
coast or in any sea-girt country in the world, must now be followed by
the speedy rise there of an English government: were gold, for instance,
found in surface diggings in Japan, Japan would be English in five
years. We know enough of Chili, of the new Russian country on the Amoor,
of Japan, 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 to 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, sympathizing 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.
The single danger that looms in the more distant future is the eventual
control of Congress by the Irish, while the English retain their hold on
the Pacific shores.
* * * * *
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 prejudice--that of the
America of the law-abiding, mighty people who are imposing English
institutions on the world.