especially constructed for it at Valencia and Mission streets, the great
conflagration of the 18th of April, 1906, just failed to reach it. In
this State it had remained for a private individual, by his life work,
to collect and preserve a library that to the State of California is
almost priceless in value. This magnificent library the State of
California has recently purchased and installed in the California
Building, at the State University, where its usefulness is being
developed by the Academy of Pacific Coast History, an association
organized in connection with the history work of the University. By a
series of happy accidents, then, we are in a position to start with as
great a nucleus of its historical data as any commonwealth ever had.
There remains the great work of cataloguing and publishing, rendering
available to the investigation of scholarship this mass of original
data, and the State should immediately provide the liberal fund
necessary for the mechanical and clerical administrative work.

While the State is completing the trust with reference to the material
it already has on hand, the all-destroying march of Time still goes
swiftly on, however. Manuscripts in foreign lands are fading and being
lost, parchments are becoming moth-eaten or mildewed, whole archives
without duplicate are at the mercy of a mob, or a revolution, or a
conflagration, and a generation of men and women still alive are quickly
passing away, carrying with them an "unsung Iliad" of the Sierras and
the plains. In the presence of these facts, we should not stand idle.
One great fraternal organization has already done, and is still loyally
doing, more than its share. In the great work of endowing fellowships in
Pacific Coast history at Berkeley there is room enough for all. Here is
an opportunity for private munificence. A fine civism will not find a
more pressing necessity, or a more splendid opportunity. An endowment of
$100,000 invested in five per cent bonds will yield an annual fellowship