its income of (1913) $15,000,
library of 400,000 titles, and building valued at $175,000; New York
(City) Historical Society, with 1057 members, endowment fund aggregating
$236,000, yearly income of $12,000, and a building costing $400,000; the
Chicago Historical Society, with a library of 130,000 titles, housed in
a $185,000 building and supported by endowment funds aggregating
$111,814; the Long Island Historical Society of Brooklyn, with (1912)
102,500 titles in its own building; the Western Reserve of Cleveland,
with 60,000 titles in a $55,000 building; the Worcester (Massachusetts)
Society of Antiquities, housing 110,000 titles within a building valued
at $50,000; and the Buffalo Historical Society, which has a library of
34,000 titles in a $200,000 building and receives a municipal grant of
$5,000 and incidental expenses per annum. These are simply the most
highly endowed. Every important town and city in those sections of the
country are represented. In the State of Massachusetts alone, there are,
besides its State Historical Society, thirty-six local historical
societies, all of them alive and active and doing good work. The only
historical societies worthy of the name in California, outside of the
institution I shall refer to later on, are the Historical Society of
Southern California, in Los Angeles, with a membership of fifty, now
owning a library of 6,000 titles, housed in the Museum of History,
Science and Art in Exposition Park, owned by the county, with the
publication of eight volumes of local history to its credit, and the
Archeological Institution of the Southwest, also of Los Angeles, the
latter institution, however, being not exclusively a historical society.

I submit to you, as Californians, whether this is a record in which we
can take any pride. With the exception of the pitiful attempts of its
loyal friends from time to time to revive the California Historical
Society, absolutely no organization work whatever, except what has
lately been initiated at Berkeley, has been done by any public
institution to promote the publication of California history or the
collection of material therefor. With a history such as ours, with its
halo of romance, with its peculiarity of incident, with its epoch-making
significance, is it not a burning shame that our people have not long
ago, either through private endowment or through public institutions,
taken as much pride in the preservation of our history as its m