1859. The election resulted in the triumph of the entire Democratic State ticket, Mr. Haight's majority over Mr. Gorham being as already stated.

There is probably no better or surer method of ascertaining the position occupied by a man in the opinion of his fellow-citizens, and the character he bears among them, than for him to become a candidate for some prominent office, especially at a time when party feeling runs high. Every act of his life, and every word that he has ever spoken that can by any known mode of conclusion or misconstruction be made to bear upon the question at issue and turned against him, are immediately blazoned forth in the public journals. Not only is his public life subjected to the scrutiny of his political opponents, but his private life and affairs, and the motives that may have influenced him in any particular matter, are dragged forth and commented upon with perfect freedom. To a reasonable extent, it is right enough that such should be the case, but party zeal often oversteps its legitimate boundary, and engages in systematic defamation and abuse. The man who successfully passes through such an ordeal and escapes therefrom with untarnished reputation, is to be considered something more than fortunate; and no better proof can be adduced of the high moral standard of Mr. Haight than to say, that during the entire gubernatorial contest just alluded to, bitter as it was, no attempt was made to attack his private char

acter.

Gov. Haight was inaugurated December 5th, 1867, and since then has administered the State government with general acceptance. His official term as Governor expires in December, 1871.

Address,

Delivered at Sacramento, Cal., May 8th, 1869, upon the Completion of the Pacific Railroad.

BY GOVERNOR H. H. HAIGHT.

FELLOW-CITIZENS: We meet to-day to celebrate one of the most remarkable events of this eventful age, and whose influence upon the future of our country and upon human destiny it would be difficult properly to measure; one of the grandest triumphs of American enterprise, engineering, and constructive skill and energy of which our history can boast. It ushers in a new era in American progress, and while it is an event of world-wide significance, it is one of special importance to our own country and our own State.

I recollect some years ago looking at a picture, which many of you doubtless have seen, representing a family of pioneers who had accomplished the tedious journey overland, and having reached the crest of the Sierras, stood gazing with enraptured vision upon the magnificent panorama which extended before their eyes in the Valley of the Sacramento. The noble river in the distance seemed like a silver thread meandering through the great valley; the purple summits of the Coast Range rose in front to the westward, and far to the south stretched the fertile plains of the San Joaquin, until in the soft haze of our landscapes their limit was lost in the horizon.

In a metaphorical sense we stand upon such an eminence to-day. Behind us is the rugged journey, with its desert sands, its savage tribes, its cooling springs, making oases, where at times we have rested from our toil; around us is the pure air and over us the blue sky, while within us our hearts beat high with hope and confidence, and before us lies in its beauty the rich prospect of our boundless future.

In looking back over our journey, did time permit, one would be tempted to extend the review beyond our own personal experience, and the history of our own State and country, to note a few of the most memorable epochs which have marked human progress during the eighteen centuries that are past. To trace the history of civilization, however, during this period would require far more than the time now allotted, and is a subject which would task the loftiest powers. Otherwise, it might be interesting to dwell upon those prominent epochs which have signalized the progress of mankind, since the advent of Christianity marked an advance from paganism to theism, and from a religion of forms to one of spirit; from the time when the code of Justinian marked a memorable era in legislation, to the period when Magna Charta developed a new and rational theory of government, and thence to the enlightenment of the present day. This progress, it is true, has not been uniform or constant. The tide has had its ebb as well as its flood. There have been tem

porary retrogressions in almost every department of human activity— in science, in government, and in religion.

Nations have exchanged places in the scale; some have relinquished freedom for despotic rule, religious liberty for blind superstition, power for weakness, and science for ignorance, while other nations have risen from barbarism to the heights of knowledge, and from small beginnings have attained greatness in the arts and sciences, in freedom, wealth, and power.

The great nations of the present day are none of them ten centuries old. England's greatness dates from the revolution of 1640, before modern civilization had penetrated the domain of the Czar, before the Prussian monarchy or the American Republic were known among the nations, when Spain was the leading power on land, and Holland was mistress of the seas.

Human progress for the last two centuries has known little pause. Dynasties have risen and fallen; revolutions and civil wars have deluged portions of the world with blood; but heretofore good has been evolved out of evil, and, during war and peace, political changes and national vicissitudes, the minds of men have been year by year more emancipated from thraldom, and more active in investigation, and in useful invention and discovery.

In the history of human progress it seems to us as if the chapter devoted to the present century would fill as large a space as the eighteen centuries which have preceded it. It is now but little more than two-thirds gone, and yet what improvements and discoveries it has witnessed. When the last century closed, and for some years afterwards, no steamboat had been built. Nearly a fourth of the present century had passed before railway construction was inaugurated, and nearly half of it was gone before electricity was pressed into man's service, as his messenger to annihilate distance and bring into instant intercourse the most remote islands and continents. Anthracite coal was never used as fuel in dwellings, nor was any city lighted with coal gas until after the year 1800.

Time would fail to enumerate even the most important discoveries and inventions of this century. In locomotion, in the art of printing, in weaving and sewing by machinery, in dyeing and coloring; in hydraulics and optics; in the application to machinery of steam and hot air; in the thousand improvements in fire-arms; in light, lighthouses, and lightning; in photography, from the daguerreotype to the card photograph; in agricultural implements; in cabinet work and house-building; in steam navigation; in ship building; in railways and electro-magnetic telegraphs, with their various apparatus of wire and cable, and printing; in house warming; in lighting streets and dwellings; in metal pipes and tubing; in sewerage and drainage; in cotton, wool, flax, hemp, and silk production and manufacture-in all these and many other channels the minds of men have been busy and fruitful during the sixty-nine years of the present century, until the limit of invention seems to be almost reached and human ingenuity exhausted.

Marshall's discovery of the particles of gold in the mill-race at

Coloma, was the beginning of a great revolution in the commerce and business of the world, and in the nominal value of labor and property. It changed our geography, and gave a new expansion to American ideas. What had before seemed hyperbole, became reality; the empty boasts of stump orators seemed about to be verified by facts. The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had secured us in possession of the fairest, the most genial and fruitful part of the American continent, and as we in our partial judgment think, of the globe. We had almost realized the poet's dream of exchanging our "pent-up Utica" for "the whole boundless continent." We still lacked the British Possessions and Mexico, but we were in the position of one gorged with food and incapacitated from further indulgence, until time was allowed for digestion and assimilation. I speak of a revolution in the commerce and business of the world, and in the value of labor and property. Two substances alone, gold and silver, are an accepted standard of value and a universal medium of exchange. Like all other articles, the intrinsic value of these metals is regulated by the quantity produced, the cost of production, and the demand for their use. The demand has increased with the expansion of commerce, but its increase bears no ratio to the increased supply. The whole amount of gold and silver in the old world at the discovery of America was estimated to be $170,000,000, and the total annual product of gold in the world for some years previous to 1848, was but $20,000,000. At this rate it would have required a century to produce $2,000,000,000. Within the past twenty years there have been added to the stock of precious metals more than this latter sum.

The obvious result would be, as it has been, to diminish the exchangeable value of gold and silver, so that to procure many of the necessaries and comforts of life requires about three times as much money as it did twenty years ago.

This, however, is not the time to weary you with statistics, or discuss questions of political economy. The Oregon and Mexican treaties gave us a new geography; but neither Oregon, with its majestic river, its productive soil, and its " continuous woods," nor California with its healthful and equable climate, was accessible to immigration by any except the roving trapper and frontiersman. Trackless deserts, infested by tribes of Indians, and lofty mountain ranges intervened between the States of the Union and the newlyacquired territory along the Pacific.

The thirst for gold in 1849 and the few following years stimulated a multitude to defy all dangers aud difficulties in the effort to reach the new El Dorado. An almost continuous line of emigrants crossed the plains and reached the Pacific, way-worn with travel, and decimated by famine, pestilence, and massacre. Another army crowded steamers and sailing vessels for the Isthmus of Panama, and encountered the miasma of the tropics and the discomforts of a voyage in over-crowded and ill-supplied vessels. Thus, by sea and land, the stream of adventurers poured into the region of gold. Europe added its contribution, and the penal colonies of Great Britain also-some of which latter was of indifferent quality.

So they came in 1849 and 1850, a vast throng, mostly men in the prime of life, full of adventurous energy-the élite of the enterprise of older countries, carrying with them, in spite of some vicious and dangerous elements, a large infusion of Anglo-Saxon respect for law, order, and constituted authority.

The tract of emigration across the plains was dotted with the graves of those who fell by the way, and in the lack of ordinary comforts multitudes more would have soon found a grave in California but for the salubrity of its climate.

The early emigration was composed of heterogeneous elements. All forms of vice and dissipation were indulged unblushingly by men and women set loose from the restraints of settled society, and freed from the control of a sound public sentiment. There were many noble spirits who labored to lay broad and deep the foundations of religious, educational, and charitable institutions, and to organize Republican government on these shores. Some of them have rested from their labors, leaving behind them monuments more enduring than marble, and some are still pursuing their career of usefulness among us.

In looking back at the past, how checkered is the prospect! Conflagrations have swept our cities and towns with the besom of destruction. The commercial metropolis of the State has more than once been almost wholly destroyed by fire, with no insurance to repair the broken fortunes of its citizens, and the present capital has suffered not only from fire, but from the more appalling disasters of flood. Mercantile embarrassments and disaster, with extreme depreciation of property, were superadded to the ruin wrought by flood and fire.

There are shadows in the picture like all of this world's experience; but in disaster and distress, Saxon and Celtic energy vindicated its claim to supremacy over all the obstacles of accident and of nature. The winter of our discontent has been exchanged for glorious summer, and a stable edifice of prosperity has been reared upon the ruins of our shattered fortunes. No more invincible perseverance has ever been manifested by, any community under disheartening circumstances than by that of Sacramento, and her citizens are at last sharing with those of other cities a prosperity beyond that of any former period, and rejoicing in the certainty of a bright future.

For the first year of our California experience, those of us who were here, felt many longings for the old homes and friends we had left beyond the mountains; an intense desire for some rapid and direct communication with the Eastern States, pervaded the mass of the population. It was never absent from our thoughts by day, or from our dreams by night. The lack of it induced many to bid a reluctant farewell to the sunny skies and attractive scenes of California, and seek their former homes east of the mountains.

Our only communication with the East in those days was the Panama steamer, first occasional, then monthly. The journey overland consumed months, and a telegraph or railway during the present generation was looked upon as chimerical. Installments of news