ht offer for thousands at least a winter of
content.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE GENERAL OUTLOOK.--LAND AND PRICES.

From the northern limit of California to the southern is about the same
distance as from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Charleston, South
Carolina. Of these two coast lines, covering nearly ten degrees of
latitude, or over seven hundred miles, the Atlantic has greater extremes
of climate and greater monthly variations, and the Pacific greater
variety of productions. The State of California is, however, so
mountainous, cut by longitudinal and transverse ranges, that any
reasonable person can find in it a temperature to suit him the year
through. But it does not need to be explained that it would be difficult
to hit upon any general characteristic that would apply to the stretch
of the Atlantic coast named, as a guide to a settler looking for a home;
the description of Massachusetts would be wholly misleading for South
Carolina. It is almost as difficult to make any comprehensive statement
about the long line of the California coast.

It is possible, however, limiting the inquiry to the southern third of
the State--an area of about fifty-eight thousand square miles, as large
as Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode
Island--to answer fairly some of the questions oftenest asked about it.
These relate to the price of land, its productiveness, the kind of
products most profitable, the sort of labor required, and its
desirability as a place of residence for the laborer, for the farmer or
horticulturist of small means, and for the man with considerable
capital. Questions on these subjects cannot be answered categorically,
but I hope to be able, by setting down my own observations and using
trustworthy reports, to give others the material on which to exercise
their judgment. In the first place, I think it demonstrable that a
person would profitably exchange 160 acres of farming land east of the
one hundredth parallel for ten acres, with a water right, in Southern
California.

[Illustration: YUCCA-PALM.]

In making this estimate I do not consider the question of health or
merely the agreeability of the climate, but the conditions of labor, the
ease with which one could support a family, and the profits over and
above a fair living. It has been customary in reckoning the value of
land there to look merely to the profit of it beyond its support of a
family, forgetting that agriculture and