The delegation to the General Conference from South America
Editorial Correspondence
By M. C. W.
(From the General Conference)
FROM sea to sea; from the broad Pacific to the turbulent Atlantic; from the land of perpetual summer-time to the summer days of the winter land; from the Golden-gated metropolis by the western sea to the metropolis of the Western Continent by the eastern sea; from the land of the orange to the land of the apple; from the slope of the Sierras westward to the sunrise slope of the Appalachians;—so might we go on for a page more; for the striking differences are numerous, and disparaging to neither. In some of the blessed things of life one abounds and the other superabounds. Both are blessed, neither is perfect, yet the smiles of God are upon them both, and upon both falls His sunshine and rain.
Island Mission representatives at the General Conference
There were thirty-six of us when we all got on board at the city of Los Angeles, and there were about twenty of these at San Francisco and Mountain View that boarded the first car on the afternoon of May 6, 1913, for the S. D. A. General Conference at Washington, listed for May 15 to June 7. Seventy or more left California for the transcontinental trip and the conference, some in small parties and singles going before, others taking other lines. Of these we write not.
We chronicle only the two exclusive car-loads from the two great Western cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles, to Washington, leaving the first city May 6, 4 P.M., and reaching the last May 12, 10:40 A.M. In charge of our party were Mr. Mason and Mr. Lape, the former to El Paso, the latter throughout the trip. Being acquainted with the route, these gentlemen not only interested the party, but informed them.
Altho the writer had been over the route twice before, he found interesting incidents recalled, and obtained new information regarding various places along the way.
It is always a ride of interest to the open-eyed and observing. The fertile grain fields and prolific fruit orchards of California are inspiring pictures, altho the dry year has affected grain crops, and the cold of last winter froze the oranges. But what is an off year in California with the normal yearly fruits and the normal California spirit!
The coast line from San Francisco to Los Angeles is the pleasant route in warm weather, with its century of miles of surf, its cooling sea air, and its interesting towns of San Jose, Paso Robles, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Barbara. Tracks and service between San Francisco and San Jose and the smaller towns of the peninsula are excellent; and the scenery through the Santa Clara Valley, with its orchards of prune, peach, and apricot, is always of interest. Its ranches sell from $500 to $3,000 an acre. Fine old missions are left behind as our train speeds on to Los Angeles.
Will the city ever stop growing? Its growth is certainly phenomenal. There always seems to be a boom on, which does not seem to collapse. And Pasadena and Long Beach and other Southern California towns are in the same progressive family. Again and again Los Angeles stretches out beyond its border line, and lays down new frontiers far beyond, but soon the new spaces are filled, and the city border is ready for another “trek.”
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Editorial Correspondence
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Fifteen million boxes of oranges and lemons distribute the gold of Southern California to the world every year,— 45,000 carloads, which means about $35,000,000 annually in these products alone.
Into Los Angeles will soon be pouring a tide of crystal-clear mountain water through immense water channels 240 miles long, finding their source in the base of Mount Whitney, of the Sierras.
Leaving California, we strike the desert regions, stretching to a great extent from the sinking to the Salton Sea to undefined regions in Texas.
Salton Sea was at one time doubtless a part of the Gulf of California, but some local upheaval cut it off from the rest of the gulf, thus forming a small, salt inland sea. When we first passed over the road, a few years ago, the track dipped to nearly 300 feet below sea-level; but since the recent breaking in of the Colorado River, the track has receded up the valley till it is now but 243 feet below sea-level. The old salt depot is submerged. There would have been a great sea formed had it not been for the herculean efforts of Southern Pacific engineers, who undertook the work after the Federal engineers had given it up as hopeless. The waters now are gradually diminishing through evaporation, but it will be some time before the low normal level of years ago is reached.
But the desert is not all desert. There are beautiful oases sprinkled all along the way. A surface river has been dammed, underground streams have been reached by the well borer, the fountains rising in the far Sierras or the Rockies have been tapped, and the thirsty, willing land grows green and fertile in response, as witness Palm Springs, Indio, Coachella, Mecca, Imperial Valley—a transformed waste of more than 600,000 acres, where in ten years have grown five towns, where have come 25,000 people, where the acres in cotton rise into the thousands. At Yuma 186,000 acres will spring into life from the great Laguna Dam on the Colorado. The Roosevelt Dam at Phoenix holds in its life waters 250,000 acres, and changes the Salt River Valley into a region of beauty and prosperity.
Our train speeds on through Arizona and New Mexico, and we hear of new talked-of or projected dams, and see in vision new fields of greenness and harvest. At one point in the desert we traveled for miles in the sight of a beautiful lake lying next to the mountains on the north, in which were scattered many islands, their various shaped tops reflected in the depths of the cool water. And yet its islands were but the foot-hills of the mountain range beyond, and its water, with its wavelets, but the mirage of the superheated air of the desert dancing over its shimmering sands. So real it looked, and we had but the word of our guide and the geography of the region to undeceive us. Yes, there were also the little whirling clouds of sand which would occasionally sweep over its surface.
Yet, as we looked upon that seeming sheet of water, we felt that it was a prayer of nature for the need of that region, the cry for water, water, from the trillion thirsty throatlets of the soil, and a promise of abundance in the desert, demonstrated again and again by the fruitful oases. And we thought what a greater blessing it would be to humanity if the millions of gold which are wrought into the great steel battleships could be used to make the deserts of the Rockies and Sierras blossom like the rose! O, the misdirected energy and waste of this old world!
Interesting and quaint historical incidents dot the way. At Langtry, Texas, for instance, is a diminutive frame building bearing this legend: “Judge Roy Bean, Justice of the Peace. Law West of the Pecos.” The old judge with his one law book has, we believe, crossed the border line of the land of death. Very accommodating he was to the thirsty plainsman. He would adjourn court to serve drinks. He had an eye to the profits. A “tenderfoot” thought to add to his fame by stopping to drink with Judge Bean, but found the court in session. The judge adjourned it to serve his customer, who, to prolong the interview, handed out a twenty dollar gold piece for the quarter’s worth of drink. The judge pocketed the coin and took his seat on the bench. The customer waited for his change till the conductor called “All aboard,” when our “tenderfoot” plucked up courage to ask for his change. Interrupted, the court recalled what he had failed to note,—that the customer was fined $19.75 for disturbing the court. He departed a sadder if not a wiser man. It is related, too, how the old judge held inquest over a man who fell from the bridge into the Pecos River and was killed. He confiscated the dead man’s gun and fined him ten dollars, the amount found on his person, for carrying concealed weapons. These and other incidents were related by Mr. Lape, our guide, to relieve the monotonous miles of the desert crossing.
There is an interesting spider-web bridge 2,184 feet long across the Pecos River, with the water flowing 321 feet below. Yet the bridge, world noted, is considered perfectly safe.
At San Antonio, Texas, a city of 100,000, some of our company looked upon the old Alamo, in which in March, 1836, 182 brave Texans waged unequal fight for eleven days with 5,000 Mexicans under Santa Ana. Here fell Travis, Colonel Bowie, and David Crockett. One woman with a little child and a Negro were all that were left to tell the tale. Texas inscribed on her monument to her heroes: “Thermopyle had her messenger of defeat; the Alamo had none.” “Remember the Alamo” became the Texan slogan against Mexico.
In our occasional stops across the desert the native mixed breed Spanish brought eatables to the train, and it was of more than passing interest to see the strict sanitarians at home purchase the delectable cones of ice-cream swarming with germs, purveyed by dirty children. But we will not tell the names of these sanitarians—not one. They were too many, but we remember.
Old Mexico, in sight for many miles, was at peace on its visible border.
At New Orleans, many of our party who had never visited the quaint old Southern city, having an individuality all its own, took sight-seeing automobiles, with accompanying lecturers, and obtained a fairly good view of the city by electric light.
We pass, between the cities of San Antonio and New Orleans, the rice lands of Texas and Louisiana. Corn, sorghum, and millet appear. Capital is erecting mills for cleaning and polishing the rice kernels; but let us tell our readers, on the side, that the unpolished is better and cheaper. Sometimes the rice is drilled into the soil, sometimes the land is plowed in water and the rice sown and harrowed in wet. Water is kept on the growing rice for about seventy days, and then drawn off, and the harvest after a while follows.
Then there rise before us, as we swiftly pass, the sugar-cane plantations and the mills. You can taste the flavor of black New Orleans molasses and the old brown sugar. America as yet produces only about one sixth of the sugar she uses.
The forests in this region, with the long pendant mosses, remind you of Longfellow’s oaks of Evangeline, “bearded with moss like druids of old.” The weird, creeping tales of the swamps in old slave days are recalled by the swiftly passing scenery.
In New Orleans the governor’s house, the cabildo, in the old French days prior to 1803, when the treaty of the Louisiana purchase was signed, is still standing. But there are few of the French creoles to-day, and many Italian. The city is now well drained and sewered at a cost of $25,000,000, whereas it used to be a pest-house of yellow fever. The silt of the father of waters is building up banks for the river out into the Gulf until it now extends 110 miles from the city. The well-known Lake Pontchartrain, a feature of the city, and Lake Borgne, are arms of the Gulf of Mexico extending into the land.
But we must not pause here. The old South is changing, as tokens many indicate, all the way from New Orleans to Washington. We made a short stop at Montgomery, the first capital of the Confederacy, and some of us took a little run out into the business portions of this thriving city.
Occasionally we pass one of the old plantations of the days “befo’ de wah,” with its hospitable mansion, and the “quarters” of the slaves. But these are rapidly going to ruin. We pass through Chehaw in Alabama, five miles from which is the school of Booker T. Washington, at Tuskegee. At Auburn is the largest polytechnic institute and agricultural college in the South.
Our stop at Atlanta permitted some hustling ones to see the business city, the beginning of Sherman’s three hundred mile march to the sea. Atlanta has a population of 160,000, one of the commercial centers and the publishing center of the South.
At Gainesville, Georgia, is the largest cotton-mill in the South, the employees living in a village by themselves.
Through a corner of the “Palmetto State,” South Carolina, across the “Tarheel State,” North Carolina, through the “Old Dominion,” famous for its great apostles of civil and religious freedom—Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Henry, and others—on to Washington, the capital of the nation, the end of our journey. We can not speak too highly (not solicited) of the railway and its service. It was all that could be asked, in general and particular.
The Conference
Your scribe was in the hospital for several days after arrival, and is not normal physically as yet. Hence this delay.
The conference opened with about 3,5006people in attendance. There are 356 delegates present from all parts of the world, about 30 more than four years ago. It is a remarkable thing that of the delegates elected, only two failed from any cause to reach here. Besides the delegates at large and from America, we have Canada, Australasia, Great Britain, several conferences from all parts of Europe. Far Siberia, Syria, Africa throughout, South America, China, Japan, Korea, India, the Philippines, and islands of the sea, all sent delegates.
Dr. John Fox, of the American Bible Society, thought it the most remarkable gathering he had ever visited.
One of the blessed things manifest in these early days of the conference is the splendid spirit of unity and fellowship. The reports thus far given from the fields are especially encouraging, and show progress in “the regions beyond.”
From every land, all reached the conference in safety, and as so many of them expressed it, “with return tickets.” They were not sorry they had gone; it was their life-work and life field. The opening meeting was largely filled by short speeches from leading men and old pioneers, like Elder J. N. Loughborough. Some of the old faces were wanting which were here four years ago; and one war-worn soldier, Elder G. A. Irwin, fell asleep at this conference, at the age of sixty-nine. Hardships through which he passed during his experience in the Civil War, especially in Andersonville and Libby prisons, had much to do with this.
The gain of recorded Sabbath-keepers during the last four years was 16,627, the present enrolment recording 114,206. The increase in tithe during the period of 1908 to 1912 was $552,228.07; the amount paid in 1912, $1,653,654.54. Offerings to foreign missions in 1908 amounted to $308,045.68; in 1912, $595,004.76. This shows that the love of God and His work is not diminishing.
