Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/818

, that a lower, more mercenary political order still prevails. Reform rests with the young men, who are organizing, regardless of party, to work for the purification of politics, and with a new conservative class the horticulturists.

Stanford's railroad-builders, breaking down the mountain walls, so that the world-spirit surged in, opened the way for new industries, and the same chain of circumstances that delayed the California's realization of the end of his Utopia allowed the firm establishment of a vast group of occupations before impossible. Foremost of these was that varied and profitable industry which some have called "intensive horticulture"—the industry that makes an acre produce more food value than a hundred acres of wheat or corn. California made a new start, and escaped industrial ruin, chiefly by reason of vineyards, gardens, orchards, seed-farms, hop-yards, and the whole group of allied pursuits. These industries educated a great number of cattle-raisers and wheat farmers, supplemented by clerks and mechanics with their small savings, into horticulturists. Thus California obtained a new and very valuable class of conservative citizens, well out of debt, and more intelligent than the ordinary farmer. The movement toward horticulture, as a business, began when the Central Pacific was completed, and went on steadily through all the years of ferment. It was the most hopeful movement of the time, for it built up the interior of the State, it broke up the great stock-ranges and wheat ranches, and it promised to restore to California far more than had been lost. As soon as horticulture became established as the great future industry of the State, an era of immigration began, first in southern California, then over the whole region. The inevitable readjustment of forces and shifting of industrial centers followed, and is still in progress.

For fifty years to come horticultural interests will probably increase, and among horticulturists the skilled fruit-grower, owning from ten to fifty acres of land, will best represent his class. Such a person is likely to be more of a business man than the average farmer, and is in closer relations to town and city life. He is compelled to travel more, watches the markets and the fields of invention closer, and represents, all in all, a finer type. A California fruit-grower is in some respects akin to the middle class of suburban dwellers near Boston and New York, with this very important difference, that he actually and constantly makes his living from the soil he owns. The one tendency of his life is toward what may be termed "extreme Californianism," for he is growing almonds or oranges or something or other that can not be produced at a profit in many other places on the continent, and the "glorious climate" is his best friend. But, on the other hand, he is in a skilled business, full of technical details, requiring