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 million, 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 fatal mistake of our Governments not to have seen this before it has become too late, and the absurd and useless tariffs in mens 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 labor 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.

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 or 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 Volexemi, 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.

CHAPTER XXXII

LECTURING TOUR IN AMERICA-CALIFORNIA TO QUEBEC

As my only lecture engagement on my way home was at the Michigan Agricultural College on July 29, I proposed to spend a fortnight among the alpine flowers of the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains; and as on my way to San Francisco I had passed over the Sierra in the night, I left Stockton at 7 A.M. in order to proceed by a local mid-day train from Sacramento to the summit level, where there is a small, rough hotel, chiefly used by the men engaged in the repair of the railway.

I had three hours to wait at Sacramento, the State capital, a pleasant town, with abundance of trees and gardens in the suburbs. I bought here a very handy two-foot rule, which folded up into a length of four inches, being thus most convenient for the pocket. It was also very usefully divided in a variety of ways. The outer side of one face was divided into eighths of an inch, and the inner side into tenths. The other face was divided into sixteenths and twelfths of an inch, while the outer edge was divided into tenths and hundredths of a foot. It was well made, would go into my waistcoat pocket, and has been very useful to me ever since. I have never seen one like it in any English tool-shop, and though it was rather dear (three shillings), it has served as a pleasant and useful memento of my American tour.

Leaving Sacramento at noon, we reached the foothills in about two hours, and soon began to see the effects of hydraulic mining in a fine valley reduced to a waste of sand, gravel, and rock heaps, the fertile surface soil broken up and buried under masses of barren and unsightly refuse, which may in time become covered with trees, but will probably never be profit

ably cultivable. Having passed this, at one spot I saw a group of tall golden yellow lilies, which blazed out grandly as the train passed them. When we had reached a height of forty-five hundred feet snow-sheds began, short ones at first, and at considerable intervals, but afterwards longer and closer together, and for the last fourteen miles below the summit they were almost continuous. They are formed of massive roughlyhewn or sawed logs completely enclosing the line, but with so many crevices as to let in a good deal of light; but the snow soon stops these up, and in the winter they are as dark as a bricked tunnel.

Before entering them we had fine views, looking backward, down deep valleys and lateral ravines, among the slopes and ridges of which the line wound its way at a nearly uniform incline in order to avoid tunnelling. Everywhere within sight the country had been denuded of its original growth of large timber, but there were abundance of young trees of the sugarpine, white pine, Douglas and silver firs, and a few cedars, which, if allowed to grow, will again clothe these mountains with grandeur and beauty for a future generation. The visible rocks were either granite or talcose slaty beds and decomposing gneiss. There were also considerable tracts of white volcanic clay or ash, in which the gold miners work, and the layers of large round pebbles here and there showed where ancient river channels had been cut across by the existing

streams.

We reached the summit (seven thousand feet above the sea) at 6:13 in a large snow-shed opening into the railroad warehouses and workshops, and into the hotel. After dinner I strolled out to a small marshy lake in a hollow, and found a fine subalpine vegetation with abundance of flowers, promising me a great treat in its examination. The country immediately around consists of bare granite hills and knolls, with little lakes in the hollows. Just beyond the hotel there is a short tunnel which brings the railway out to the western slope of the Sierra, whence it winds around the southern shore of Donner Lake on a continuous descent to Truckee and the great Nevada silver mines. The granite rocks in the pass are every