horticulture the world over,
like almost all other kinds of business, usually do little more than
procure a good comfortable living, with incidental education, to those
who engage in them. That the majority of the inhabitants of Southern
California will become rich by the culture of the orange and the vine is
an illusion; but it is not an illusion that twenty times its present
population can live there in comfort, in what might be called luxury
elsewhere, by the cultivation of the soil, all far removed from poverty
and much above the condition of the majority of the inhabitants of the
foreign wine and fruit-producing countries. This result is assured by
the extraordinary productiveness of the land, uninterrupted the year
through, and by the amazing extension of the market in the United States
for products that can be nowhere else produced with such certainty and
profusion as in California. That State is only just learning how to
supply a demand which is daily increasing, but it already begins to
command the market in certain fruits. This command of the market in the
future will depend upon itself, that is, whether it will send East and
North only sound wine, instead of crude, ill-cured juice of the grape,
only the best and most carefully canned apricots, nectarines, peaches,
and plums, only the raisins and prunes perfectly prepared, only such
oranges, lemons, and grapes and pears as the Californians are willing to
eat themselves. California has yet much to learn about fruit-raising and
fruit-curing, but it already knows that to compete with the rest of the
world in our markets it must beat the rest of the world in quality. It
will take some time yet to remove the unfavorable opinion of California
wines produced in the East by the first products of the vineyards sent
here.

[Illustration: DATE-PALM.]

The difficulty for the settler is that he cannot "take up" ten acres
with water in California as he can 160 acres elsewhere. There is left
little available Government land. There is plenty of government land not
taken up and which may never be occupied, that is, inaccessible mountain
and irreclaimable desert. There are also little nooks and fertile spots
here and there to be discovered which may be pre-empted, and which will
some day have value. But practically all the arable land, or that is
likely to become so, is owned now in large tracts, under grants or by
wholesale purchase. The circumstances of the case compelled a