Let no man fancy that these sometimes exuberant expressions of a noble and far-seeing faith by your own predecessors and by a prescient foreigner have been revived in derision or even in doubt. Those were the days when, if some were for a party, at any rate all were for the State. These were great men, far-seeing, courageous, patriotic, the men of Forty-nine, who in such lofty spirit and with such high hope laid the foundation of this empire on the Pacific. Distance did not disturb them, nor difficulties discourage. There sits on your platform to-day a man who started from New York to California by what he thought the quickest route in December, 1848; went south from the Isthmus as the only means of catching a ship for the north, and finally entered this harbor, by the way of Chile, in June, 1849. He could go now to Manila thrice over and back in less time. And yet there are Californians of this day who profess to shrink in alarm from the remoteness and inaccessibility of our new possessions! Has the race shriveled under these summer skies? Has it grown old before its time; is its natural strength abated? Are the old energy and the old courage gone? Has the soul of this people shrunk within them? Or is it only that there are strident voices from California, sounding across the Sierras and the Rockies, that misrepresent and shame a State whose sons are not unworthy of their fathers? The arm of the Californian has not been shortened, that he cannot reach out. The salt has not left him, that he cannot occupy and possess the great ocean that the Lord has given him. Nor has he forgotten the lesson taught by the history of his own race (and of the greatest nations of the world), that oceans no longer separate--they unite. There are no protracted and painful struggles to build a Pacific railroad for your next great step. The right of way is assured, the grading is done, the rails are laid. You have but to buy your rolling-stock at the Union Iron Works, draw up your time-table, and begin business. Or do you think it better that your Pacific railroad should end in the air? Is a six-thousand-mile extension to a through line worthless? Can your Scott shipyards only turn out men-of-war? Can your Senator Perkins only run ships that creep along the coast? Is the broad ocean too deep for him or too wide? [Sidenote: New Fields and the Need for them.]