Only a little less important in degree are a large number of historical societies which represent some town or section.  For example:  The Essex Institute of Salem, Massachusetts, with 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 makers did in the creation of it?  Is it not time that civic societies in every section of this State should combine and work together for the creation of a public sentiment which will support and uphold any institution that will strive to perpetuate the record of the history of this great commonwealth?

Though there has been no sustained or organized effort on the part of the State, or of any community in the State, to recognize the duty of collecting and preserving the priceless records of its historical growth, yet, by the luck that often attends improvidence, we have the nucleus of a library which goes far toward offsetting our culpable indifference.