under circumstances that rendered doubt impossible. Senator Stanford has shown himself throughout his life a man of exceptional ability and intellectual vigour, and would hardly be imposed upon in such a matter.

Mr. Stanford met me at the station, and drove me to his house, about a mile and a half. It is a large, roomy cottage, luxuriously furnished, with very wide verandahs shaded by trees and awnings, carpeted and furnished so as to form open-air rooms, very delightful in a Californian summer. The grounds are spacious and fairly wooded with some old pines and large eucalypti, as well as many beautiful shrubs. For some distance round the house there are grass lawns, as green and smooth as any I have ever seen, with beautiful borders and flower-beds, the whole kept in the most perfect order by Chinese gardeners, with water laid on everywhere to keep up the perpetual verdure during the six or seven months of continuous heat and drought.

In the house, as in the garden, all the servants are Chinamen and boys, and both Mr. and Mrs. Stanford spoke of them in the highest terms. One of these boys had charge of her private rooms, and as they continually moved backward and forward between this house and their mansion at San Francisco, going and coming without notice, on her return she always found everything in the most perfect order, and has never missed the smallest article, though jewellery was often left on her dressing-table. Mr. Stanford declared that the Chinese had been the making of California, doing all kinds of domestic work, gardening, and shopkeeping when every European was rushing after gold. He had incurred much obloquy on account of his opposition to the anti-immigration laws and through his employing Chinese servants, but had now, to a large extent, lived it down.

After dinner we drove out to see some of the other millionaires' residences. The most remarkable of these was Mr. Flood's a kind of fairy palace built entirely of wood, highly decorated with towers and pinnacles, and painted pure white throughout. There were also fine grounds and gardens,

but none we saw were so exquisitely kept up as Mr. Stanford's by his thirty Chinese gardeners.

Next morning I was taken to see the site of the great university he was going to build to the memory of his son. He had here about eight thousand acres of land, in the midst of which the buildings and residences were to stand. There were large wooden offices close by, occupied by the architect and draughtsmen preparing the plans and working drawings; and the surrounding land was already planted with shadetrees and avenues. The plans showed a central chapel in a Norman, or rather Moorish, style of architecture, surrounded by low, one-storey buildings arranged around spacious courts, about five hundred feet by two hundred and fifty feet, to be laid out in grass, trees, and flower-beds. These buildings were to comprise dwellings for professors and students, classrooms, workshops, libraries, museums, etc., and could be almost indefinitely extended as desired. It was intended for all classes, from the poorest to the most wealthy, and to furnish a complete education from the kindergarten up to the highest departments of human knowledge, including the applications of science to industry and the arts. Arrangements would be made for the students to board themselves at the lowest possible cost. Mr. Stanford had gone into this question, and he assured me that in the best American hotels, where the rates are four or five dollars a day, the actual cost of the food, including cooking, is not more than from two or three dollars a week for each person.1

1 My friend, Professor J. C. Branner, has kindly sent me the latest register of the university, together with a popular account of it, with excellent photographic illustrations and plans; and it may interest my readers to have some particulars of this newest and in many respects most remarkable, of great educational institutions.

The whole design, of which I saw the drawings, appears to have been now carried out, and the result is very striking. The educational buildings, including a magnificent church, are arranged around a central quadrangle, five hundred and eighty feet long by two hundred and forty-six feet wide. Around this are arranged twenty-six spacious buildings, each devoted to one department of study, and these are grouped around a series of outer courts, the whole forming a quadrangle about nine hundred feet by seven hundred and seventy feet. Quite detached, at various distances around, are the boarding-houses for the students, the residences of the professors, a general library, gymnasium, workshops, and laboratories, and a magnificent museum round a central court, six hundred feet by two hundred feet.

Senator Stanford had a very high opinion of his adopted State, California, as being the richest part of the Union. He dilated on its million inhabitants producing corn enough for ten millions, of its illimitable possibilities of fruit production, and on the general well-being of the people. He expressed surprise that we do not federate all our English-speaking colonies, and thus form a "union" comparable in strength and extent with their own; and it is no doubt the great and

The educational portion is massively constructed of stone or concrete, and a very striking feature, and one well adapted to the climate, is that both the inner and the outer quadrangles are surrounded by continuous arcades, supported on massive stone pillars with groined roofs and about twenty feet wide, thus affording communication between the whole of the buildings, with complete protection from the ardent sun of California. These magnificent cloisters aggregate a mile and a quarter in length; and at the more important entrances the semicircular arches are highly decorated with carved ornamentation in the Mooresque style, and are supported on clustered columns.

The museum is a very fine building in a graceful Romano-Grecian style, and is full of fine works of art of all periods, as well as specimens of natural history. But ornament has been most lavishly bestowed upon the church, which is cruciform, one hundred and ninety feet long by one hundred and sixty feet wide, with a central tower, one hundred and ninety feet high. It is decorated with costly mosaic work both inside and out, and must be one of the most magnificent of modern churches.

At the present time there are more than fifteen hundred students, and nearly one hundred and fifty professors and teachers. The entire education is free for residents in California, with very moderate fees for those from other States. The entire cost of board and lodging, with incidental expenses, is about £60 a year; but it is stated that a very considerable number of the students are able to support themselves by about three hours' daily work, either in or outside the university, more especially those who are bookbinders, printers, carpenters, or mechanics; while many others, who can perform any domestic or manual labour thoroughly, can do the same. There are also several scholarships, which give free education and board.

The university has been endowed by Senator and Mrs. Stanford with about eighty thousand acres of land, besides the estate of Palo Alto in which it is situated (about nine thousand acres) and the Stanford mansion in San Francisco, amounting in all to about six millions sterling. It only remains to state the purpose for which the university was established by its founders.

"The object of the university is to qualify students for personal success and direct usefulness in life; it purposes to promote the public welfare by exercising an influence in behalf of humanity and civilization, teaching the blessings of liberty regulated by law, and inculcating love and reverence for the great principles of government as derived from the inalienable rights of man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

It is to be hoped that this last clause will be taught in its spirit as well as in its letter. Never, surely, has a grander memorial been raised by parents to a beloved

son.

fatal mistake of our Governments not to have seen this before it has become too late, and the absurd and useless tariffs in every colony have created insuperable difficulties to what would at first have been natural and acceptable to all. His view as to the general well-being of the people was, however, fallacious. He looked at the world, just as our legislators do, from the point of view of the employer and the capitalist, not seeing that their prosperity to a large extent depended on the presence of a mass of workers struggling for a bare subsistence. At the very time of our interview the actual fruit-grower could hardly earn the scantiest subsistence, because he was dependent on the middlemen and railway companies to get his crop to market, and because the very abundance of the crop often so lowered prices as to make it not pay to gather and pack. Since then, year by year, the unemployed and the tramp have been increasing in California as in the Eastern States, while San Francisco reproduces all the phenomena of destitution, vice, and crime characteristic of our modern great cities. But neither capitalists nor workers yet see clearly that production for profit instead of for use necessarily leads to those results. The latter class, however, thanks to the socialists, are rapidly learning the fundamental principle of social economy. When they have learnt it, the beneficent and peaceful revolution will commence which will steadily but surely abolish those most damning results of modern (so-called) civilization-insanitary labour, degrading over-work, involuntary unemployment, misery, and starvation -among those whose labour produces that ever-increasing wealth which their employers are proud of, and which their rulers so criminally misuse.

On returning to Stockton I went with my brother to Santa Cruz, one of the health resorts on the Pacific coast south of San Francisco, and thence to the forest tract of the Coast Range, where are a few of the finest trees of the redwood left in Southern California. We stayed the night at the hotel, and till the following afternoon, quite alone. The trees themselves are more beautiful than those of the Sequoia

gigantea, the foliage being more like that of our yew. The largest tree is forty-seven feet round at six feet from the ground (sixty feet at the base), and only a few feet less than three hundred feet high. The forests in which they grow are not, however, either so picturesque or so full of other fine trees, shrubs, and flowers as are those of the Sierra Nevada.

While at Santa Cruz for a day, both going and returning, I saw something of the luxuriance of Californian gardens. The common scarlet geranium grew into large bushes, forming clumps six or eight feet high, a mass of dazzling colour, and in the small back garden of a lady we visited was a plant of Tacsonia van Volxemi, which grew all over the house, and had sent branches out to an apple tree some yards away, and covered it completely with its foliage and hundreds of its drooping crimson flowers. On the sand of the sea-beach were masses of calandrinia a yard across, covered with their gorgeous blossoms, which seemed to luxuriate in the intense heat and sun-glare.

Returning to Stockton for a week, I had the opportunity of witnessing a Fourth of July celebration. There was a great procession of all the trades and professions, firemen, army corps, volunteers, officials, etc., to the town hall. A schoolboy read the Declaration of Independence, and then the "Oration" was delivered. It was pretty good in substance, but declaimed with outrageous vehemence and gesture. Then a patriotic poem was recited by a lady, but two crying infants and exploding crackers outside much interfered with the effect. All the rest of the day there were crackers all over the town, and in the evening another procession of animals, clowns, etc., crowds of people, carriages and buggies, crackers and fireworks a kind of small and rough carnival. This over, I bade farewell to my brother and sister-in-law, my nephews and nieces, my grand-nephew and grand-niece, and left for the summit level of the Sierra Nevada on my way across the continent to Quebec, whence I was to sail for Liverpool.