of the property that should be given or hereafter produced for the purpose.  On the other hand, if the government tended to regard the missions as purely subsidiary to its purpose, the outgoing missionaries to this strange land were so much the more certain to be quite uncorrupted by worldly ambitions, by a hope of acquiring wealth, or by any intention to found a powerful ecclesiastical government in the new colony.  They went to save souls, and their motive was as single as it was worthy of reverence.  In the sequel, the more successful missions of Upper California became, for a time, very wealthy; but this was only by virtue of the gifts of nature and of the devoted labors of the padres.”

Such a scheme of human effort is so unique, and so in contradiction to much that obtains today, that it seems like a narrative from another world.  Fortunately, the annals of these missions, which ultimately extended from San Diego to beyond Sonoma — stepping-stones of civilization on this coast — are complete, and their simple disinterestedness and directness sound like a tale from Arcady.  They were signally successful because those who conducted them were true to the trustee-ship of their lives.  They cannot be held responsible if they were unable in a single generation to eradicate in the Indian the ingrained heredity of shiftlessness of all the generations that had gone before.  It is a source of high satisfaction that there was on the part of the padres no record of overreaching the simple native, no failure to respect what rights they claimed, no carnage and bloodshed, that have so often attended expeditions sent nominally for civilization, but really for conquest.  Here, at least, was one record of missionary endeavor that came to full fruition and flower, and knew no fear or despair, until it attracted the attention of the ruthless rapacity and greed of the Mexican governmental authority crouching behind the project of secularization.  The enforced withdrawal of the paternal hand before the Indian had learned to stand and walk alone, coupled in some sections with the dread scourge of pestilential epidemic, wrought dispersion, decimation and destruction.  If, however, the teeming acres are now otherwise tilled, and if the herds of cattle have passed away and the communal life is gone forever, the record of what was accomplished in those pastoral days has linked the name of California with a new and imperishable architecture, and has immortalized the name of Junipero Serra[1] The pathetic ruin at Carmel is a shattered monument above a grave that will become a world’s shrine of pilgrimage in honor of one of humanity’s heroes.  The patient soul that here laid down its burden will not be forgotten.  The memory of the brave heart that was here consumed with love for mankind will live through the ages.  And, in a sense, the work of these missions is not dead — their very ruins still preach the lesson of service and of sacrifice.  As the fishermen off the coast of Brittany tell the