By FRANCES E. WILLARD, President N. W. C. T. U.

I.

I.—SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA.

In one thing Chautauqua and California are alike—each is a climax, and both are “made up of every creature’s best.” My sufficient consolation for missing one of them this year is, that I saw the other. Let us speed onward, then, taking Chautauqua as our point of departure, in a Pickwickian sense only, unless for the further reason that it has the high prerogative of making all its happy denizens believe it to be the center of gravity (and good times) for one planet at least; the meridian from which all fortunate longitude is reckoned and all lucky time-pieces set. Our swift train, “outward bound,” races along through the old familiar East and the West no longer new.

From a palace car with every eastern luxury, we gaze out on the dappled, pea-green hills of New Mexico and the wide, empty stretches of Arizona, stopping in Santa Fe—Columbia’s Damascus, in Albuquerque—a pocket edition of Chicago, and in Tucson—the storm-center of semi-tropic trade. But the “W. C. T. U.” is a plant of healing as indigenous to every soil for good as the saloon for evil, and in the first city the Governor’s wife has accepted leadership; in the second that place is held by a lovely Ohio girl, the wife of a young lawyer; and in the third a leading woman of society and church work, whose husband is one of Arizona’s most honored pioneers, consents to be our standard-bearer. These way-side errands, with their delightful new friendships and tender gospel lessons over, we hasten on to California. Some token of its affluent beauty comes to us on Easter Sabbath in the one hundred calla-lilies sent from Los Angeles, five hundred miles beyond, to adorn the church where we worship in Tucson, that marvelous oasis in the desert. “Go on, and God be with you,” says the friend who escorts us to the train; “you’ll find Los Angeles a heaven on earth.” And so, indeed, we did, coming up out of the wilderness on a soft spring day, between fair, emerald hills that stood as the fore-runners of the choicest land on which were ever mirrored the glory and the loveliness of God.

We visited the thirty leading centers of interest and activity in the great Golden State during the two months of our stay, but when the courteous mayor of this “city of the angels” welcomed us thither, and children heaped about us their baskets of flowers, rare, save in California, we told “His Honor” that of all the towns we had yet visited—and they number a thousand at least—his was the one most fitly named.

Southern California, and this its exquisite metropolis, have been a terra incognita even to the intelligent, until the steam horse lately caracoled this way. Now it is thronged by emigrants and tourists, men and women of small means reaping from half a dozen acres here what a large farm in Illinois could hardly yield, and invalids hitherto only an expense to their friends, finding the elixir of life in this balmy air, and joyously joining once more the energetic working forces of the world. Flowers are so plenty here that banks and pyramids alone can satisfy the claims of decorative art; baskets of roses are more frequent than bouquets or even boutonnieres with us. Heliotropes and fuchsias climb to the apex of the roof, while the common garden trees are oranges, lemons, limes, citrons, figs, olives and pomegranates. Strawberry short-cake can be had all the year round from the fresh fruit of one’s own garden, and oranges at the rate of nine thousand to one tree, and in some cases fifteen inches in circumference, have been raised in this vicinity. Riverside and Pasadena are adjacent colonies and bear a stronger resemblance to one’s ideal Garden of Eden than any other places I ever expect to see. Through groves of rarest semi-tropic fruit trees you ride for miles, in the midst of beautiful, modern homes, for the American renaissance is not more manifest in the suburbs of Boston or Chicago than in Southern California. Fences are nowhere visible, the Monterey cypress furnishing a hedge which puts to blush the choicest of old England; the pepper tree with drooping branches, and the Australian gum tree, tall and umbrageous, outlining level avenues whose vistas seem unending. Above all this are skies that give back one’s best Italian memories, and for a background the tranquil amplitude of the Sierra Madre Mountains. What would you more? “See Naples and die” is an outworn phrase. “See California and live” has been the magic formula of how many restored and happy pilgrims! The tonic of cold water has electrified this soil, seven years ago an utter desert, so that now three years of growth will work a transformation that fifteen would fail to bring about east of the Mississippi. To my thinking this result is but a material prototype of the heavenly estate that shall come to our America when its arid waste of brains and stomachs, usurped by alcohol, shall learn the cooling virtues of this same cold water. In Riverside my host planted in May of 1880, two thousand grape cuttings (not roots, remember), and in September, 1881, gathered from them two hundred boxes of grapes. Pasadena was founded by a good man from Maine, and is exempt from saloons by the provisions of its charter. Here, from six acres, a gentleman realized thirteen hundred dollars, clear of all expenses, last year, by drying and sacking his grapes, instead of sending them to the winery. “The profits were so much larger that hereafter his pocket-book will counsel him, if not his conscience, to keep clear of the wine trade,” said the wide awake temperance woman who gave me the item. In Pasadena, Mrs. Jennie C. Carr, whose fruit ranche and gardens, largely tilled by her own hands, disclose every imaginable variety which the most extravagant climate can produce, sells at three thousand dollars per acre, land purchased by her for a mere song six years ago. In Santa Ana and San Bernardino, also near Los Angeles, there is the same luxuriance and swift moving life. A county superintendent of schools told me he had one school district that includes 160 miles of railroad, and has a town of 800 people, where three months ago there was silence and vacancy. At San Diego, the most southerly town in California, we found the ne plus ultra of climate for consumptives, its temperature ranging from fifty-five to seventy-five degrees, and its air dry. San Diego is the oldest town in the State, having been established as a Catholic “Mission” in 1769. It is now altogether modernized and is Nature’s own sanitarium, besides being a lovely land-locked harbor of the Pacific. Santa Barbara, which we missed seeing, has a grape vine sixty years old, and a foot through, which in 1867 bore six tons of grapes, some of whose clusters weighed five pounds each. The railroad will soon make this beautiful town accessible to rapid tourists to whom the ocean is unkind. Twenty-one missions were founded over a century ago by Franciscan friars in Southern California. They brought with them from Spain the orange and the vine. They were conquerors, civilizers, subduers of the soil. They brought cattle, horses, sheep, and—alas! hogs. They conquered the land for Spain without cruelty, baptizing the Indians into the church and teaching them the arts of peace. Then followed the Mexican, then our own conquest of their territory, and now the Anglo-Saxon reigns supreme in a land on which Nature has lavished all she had to give. Upon his victory over the alcohol habit, depends the future of this goodly heritage. If he raises grapes he will survive; if he turns them into wine he must succumb.

II.—SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY.

We crossed the famous and dangerous “Tehachapi Pass” at night, and wended our way slowly through this notable valley, three hundred miles in length by thirty-five in width, stopping to found the W. C. T. U. in its four chief towns, Fresno, Tulare, Merced, and Modesto.

Irrigation is the watchword here, and as it takes capitalists to carry this through on a scale so immense, large farms are now the rule. For instance, we passed over one seventy-three miles in length by twenty in width. Later on, it is to be hoped these immense proprietaries may be settled by men whose primary object is to establish and maintain homes. At present, in the agricultural line, “big enterprises” are alone attractive. “Alfalfa,” a peculiarly hardy and luxuriant clover—imported by Governor Bigler from Chili—is the first crop, and grazing precedes grain. This plant “strikes its roots six feet or more into the soil, and never requires a second planting, while every year there are five crops of alfalfa and but two of wheat and barley.”

Varied indeed is the population of this valley. One day we dine with a practical woman from Massachusetts, who declares that the sand storms, which most people consider the heaviest discount on the valley, are “really not so bad, for they polish off the house floors as nothing else could.” The next we meet a group of earnest, motherly hearts from a dozen different States, and almost as many religious denominations, united to “provide for the common defense” of home against saloon. Next day a lawyer from Charleston invites us to his cozy residence, “because his wife knows some of our Southern leaders in the W. C. T. U.” The next we make acquaintance with half a dozen school ma’ams from the East, who have taken a ranche and set up housekeeping for themselves; and in the fourth town visited an Englishman born in Auckland, New Zealand, the leading criminal lawyer of the county, and instigator of the woman’s crusade in Oakland, who gives us a graphic description of that movement, which was a far-off echo of the Ohio pentecost.

So we move on at the rate of two meetings a day, with the hearty support of the united clergy (except the Episcopal, and often they helped us, too), and the warm coÖperation of the temperance societies, emerging in San Francisco, Monday, April 16, 1883.

III.—SAN FRANCISCO.

I am glad we did not so far forget ourselves as to arrive on Sunday, for it appears that certain good, gifted, and famous persons, who shall be nameless, telegraphed to certain Christian leaders of their intended arrival on that day, and received answer: “The hour of your coming will find us at church. The Palace is the best hotel.” Now on an overland trip, an absent-minded traveler might fail to note the precise date of his arrival in the metropolis of the Pacific, but that would be no excuse to our guid folk yonder, whose Sunday laws have been smitten from their statute books, and Christians hold themselves to strict account for their example, which now alone conserves the Christian’s worship and the poor man’s rest.

San Francisco is probably the most cosmopolitan city now extant. Its three hundred thousand people sound the gamut of nationality in the most varying and dissonant chorus that ever greeted human ears. The struggle for survival is an astonishing mixture of fierceness and good-nature. Crowding along the streets, Irish and Chinaman, New Englander and Negro, show kind consideration, but in the marts of trade and at the polls “their guns are ballots, their bullets are ideas.” Old-time asperities are softening, however, even on these battlegrounds. The trend is upward, toward higher levels of hope and brotherhood. Eliminate the alcohol and opium habits, and all these would (and will ere long) dwell together in unity. Lives like those of Rev. Dr. Otis Gibson, and Mrs. Captain Goodall, invested for the Christianizing of the Chinese, or like that of Mrs. Sarah B. Cooper, devoted to kindergartening the embryo “hoodlum,” or that of Dr. R. H. McDonald, the millionaire philanthropist, consecrated to the temperance reform, are mighty prophecies of the good time coming.

San Francisco is the city of bay windows, and its people, beyond any other on this continent, believe in sunshine and fresh air. In like manner, they are fond of ventilating every subject, are in nowise afraid of the next thing simply because it is the next, but have broad hospitality for new ideas. Rapid as the heel taps of its street life is the movement of its thought and the flame of its sympathy. Much as has been said in its dispraise, Mount Diablo—the chief feature of its environs—is not so symbolic of its spirit as the white tomb of Thomas Starr King, which, standing beside one of its busiest streets, is a perpetual reminder of noble power conserved for noblest use. Everybody knows San Francisco’s harbor is without a rival save Puget Sound and Constantinople. Everybody has heard of its “Palace Hotel,” the largest in the world, and one that includes “eighteen acres of floor;” of its “endless chain” street cars, the inevitable outgrowth of dire necessity in its up-hill streets; of its indescribable “Chinatown;” of “Seal Rock,” with its monster sea-lions, gamboling and howling year out and year in, for herein are the salient features of the strange city’s individuality. For a metropolis but thirty-four years old, the following record is unrivaled: Total value of real and personal property, $253,000,000; school property, $1,000,000; 130,000 buildings; 11,000 streets; 12 street car lines; 33 libraries and reading-rooms; 38 hospitals; 316 benevolent societies; 168 newspapers, and—the best fire department in the world!

The two drawbacks of this wonderful city are its variable climate and its possible earthquakes. A witty writer warns the intending tourist thus: “Be sure to bring your summer clothes. Let me repeat: be sure to bring your winter clothes.” To state the fact that in August one may see fur cloaks any day, and in January a June toilet is not uncommon, is but another way of stating that the galloping sea breeze, unimpeded by mountains, rushes in moist squadrons on the shore, and has all seasons for its own, in which to battle with the genial warmth of this most lovely climate. As to earthquakes, there have been but three since 1849, and these were insignificant calamities compared with one year of our domesticated western tornadoes. Less than fifty lives have been lost in California by earthquakes, thirty-seven of these occurring in the country outside of San Francisco, and less than a hundred thousand dollars worth of property has been destroyed, while two millions would not cover our loss by cyclone in a single year, to say nothing of the number of victims. Civilization seems to have a naturalizing effect on fleas, snakes and earthquakes, west of the Sierras, but acts as a tonic upon hurricanes east of the Rockies. Will our scientists please “rise to explain” this mystery so close in its relation to human weal and woe?

[To be continued.]