It is not mainly her own citizens who make this claim. They, with all their high ambitions, with all their golden dreams, are hardly alive to the great possibilities of the town. In an age pre-eminently of material progress, it is natural to lay most stress on the material advantages of site, climate, etc. So there is no end to the writing on the Bay--the one bay between San Francisco and somewhere far away in Mexico--with all it offers for commerce and for strategy; or on the unwearying efforts of the sun; on the glorious hinterland, so rich and beautiful; or the new railway that is to open it up, and link San Diego with the east; on partial awakenings at Washington to the great strategic importance of this town, and the certainty that these partial awakenings must become whole-hearted and thorough some time, and bear fruit a thousandfold. Time, time, time--there is time for all these things. Innumerable palaces will be seen, surrounding this blue jewel of a bay; looking down on it from amidst exquisite parks and gardens on the heights; there will be drives as famed as any in Switzerland or Italy. Nature herself has provided for this; and the tide of empire is rolling westward. [Illustration: Lomaland Photo. and Engraving Dept. VIEW OF SAN DIEGO WITH A GLIMPSE OF THE BAY CORONADO IN THE DISTANCE] [Illustration: Lomaland Photo. and Engraving Dept. THE U. S. GRANT HOTEL, FROM THE PLAZA, SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA] Time and again San Diego has been named with two cities of the Old World; and there is something instructive in either comparison. She is "the Naples of California," and again, "the Athens of the Pacific Coast." Cuyamaca has been likened to Vesuvius, and our bay to the Bay of Naples. Indeed, no doubt there is a physical resemblance. The conditions that made Naples are largely historic; but then they are largely climatic, and matters of situation, also. As for history, the history of San Diego lies before her. All historic conditions--Camorra, lazzaroni, plague, pestilence, national inefficiency, vice, and famine, or the blessings which are the reverse of all these--are the fruitage of one cannot say what tiny seeds sown, one cannot say when or how often. You take a child, and give it no training or bad training in its first years: it was the offspring of highly cultured parents, perhaps; but what disasters may not lie before it? On the other hand, you take a child, who has had no advantages, and give it a Râja Yoga training such as Katherine Tingley is giving to so many at Point Loma and elsewhere--such, in truth, as only Katherine Tingley knows how to give--and you need set no particular limits to the hopes you hold for that child's future. There is a great parallelism with this in the early years of a city or community.