I know of few things more pitiful than the annual migration of hopeless consumptives which formerly took place to Los Angeles, Pasadena, and San Diego.  The Pullman cars in the winter used to be full of sick people, banished from the East by physicians who do not know what else to do with their incurable patients.  They went to the large hotels of Los Angeles or Pasadena, to pay a rate they cannot afford.  They shivered in half-warmed rooms; took cold after cold; their symptoms grew alarming; their money wasted away; and finally, in utter despair, they were hurried back homeward, perhaps to die on board the train.  Or it may be that they choose cheap lodging-houses, at prices more nearly within their reach.  Here, again, they suffer for want of home food, home comforts, and home warmth, and the end is just the same.  People hopelessly ill should remain with their friends; even California has no health to give to those who cannot earn it, in part at least, by their own exertions.

It is true that the “one-lunged people” form a considerable part of the population of Southern California.  It is also true that no part of our Union has a more enlightened or more enterprising population, and that many of these men and women are now as robust and vigorous as one could desire.  But this happy change is possible only to those in the first stages of the disease.  Out-of-door life and physical activity enable the system to suppress the germs of disease, but climate without activity does not cure.  So far as climate is concerned, many parts of the arid regions in Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado, as well as portions of Old Mexico (Cuernavaca or Morelia, for example) are more favorable than California, because they are protected from the chill of the sea.  Another class of health-seekers receives less sympathy in California, and perhaps deserves less.  Jaundiced hypochondriacs and neurotic wrecks shiver in California winter boarding-houses, torment themselves with ennui at the country ranches, poison themselves with “nerve foods,” and perhaps finally survive to write the sad and squalid “truth about California.”  Doubtless it is all inexpressibly tedious to them; subjective woe is always hard to bear — but it is not California.

There are others, too, who are disaffected, but I need not stop to discuss them or their points of view.  It is true, in general, that few to whom anything else is anywhere possible find disappointment in California.

With all this, the social life is, in its essentials, that of the rest of the United States, for the same blood flows in the veins of those whose influence dominates it.  Under all its deviations and variations lies the old Puritan conscience, which is still the backbone of the civilization of the republic.  Life in California is a little fresher, a little freer, a good deal richer, in its physical aspects, and for these reasons, more intensely and characteristically American.  With perhaps ninety per cent of identity