Its honored executive officer for many years, Rev. and Prof. Charles B. Sumner, and its historian, was a native of Southbridge, Mass. The original impulse was given by him and as secretary of the board of trustees, he effectively co-operated in gathering the financial resources of the institution and through all the years has been unfailing in counsel and devotion.

Mills College, formerly Mills Seminary, just outside of Oakland and beautifully situated at the foot of Alameda Hills, has often been called the Mt. Holyoke of the West. Its founders were Rev. and Mrs. Cyrus Mills. Dr. Mills was a graduate of Williams College. Mrs. Mills, the principal, came from Vermont. She was one of Mary Lyon's pupils and impressed her own forceful spirit upon the successive classes of young women who studied at the school.

Still another New Englander who for forty-five years has nobly represented on the Pacific Coast its sterling traits is Rev. William Chauncy Pond, D.D., born in Cambridgeport, Mass., Feb. 22, 1830. He was superintendent of the California Oriental Mission, championing the cause of the Chinese at the time when the feeling was strongest against them. The Orientals. on the Coast have had no stauncher friend or benefactor than their deeply loved and widely respected. Dr. Pond.

The love of one New Englander for his native sec

tion has found tangible and novel expression in the Memorial Museum in the Golden Gate Park at San Francisco, created by Charles P. Wilcomb, formerly of Lakeport, N. H. His antiquarian instinct led him to bring together many implements, utensils and other objects gathered in all the New England states, his ambition being to have a specimen of every article used in New England from the date of its settlement to the beginning of the eighteenth century, from a colonial bedstead to a Puritan Bible.

Southern California more closely resembles New England than any other section of the state. In its population those elements which made the gold-mining zone so turbulent were never prominent. A larger per cent of New Englanders reside there proportionally than elsewhere. Through frequent reunions those who come from the same section of New England keep the ties warm with their ancestral homes. Many of them come simply to escape one rigorous winter in the East, but when once they have felt the spell of the orchards and the gardens, the mountains and the sea, they come and come again, often to stay for the remainder of their lives. In many cases they do not settle down to lives of ease but gird on the sword anew for the strife in behalf of a better California and a better world. Such men as Rev. James T. Ford, Rev. L. H. Tracy,

Judge Charles E. Harwood, George W. Marston, Henry A. Palmer, Nathan Richards, Henry Kirk White Bent, Charles B. Sheldon, Myron Crafts, are held in high honor as constructive forces in the life of Southern California.

Says Frank A. Miller of Riverside, one of the oldest residents of the state: "The debt of Protestantism in California to New England cannot be measured. There is not a Congregational Church in Southern California -over forty years old-that does not owe its existence to the labors of preachers and laymen from New England. An examination of the membership lists of the churches in Los Angeles, Pasadena, Long Beach, Pomona, Riverside, San Diego, Redlands and other cities will reveal their influence on our religious life. A similar revelation is afforded in the history of other denominations. The foundations of our faith in this state were laid by the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers. They built up great business enterprises, they established schoolhouses, they ran newspapers. When my father came to this state the professional lawbreakers would refer-not in derision but in fearto the activities of those 'damned religious Yankees.'"

Generally speaking, the churches in this section of the state are strong, and mirror our many-sided American Christianity from its most conservative types to the most outré forms of organized religion,

and here again the differentiation that New England itself has come to present in these later years is reflected three thousand miles from Plymouth Rock.

Surveying this state as a whole, the touch of New England idealism and initiative is evident in many particulars. The voices that from '49 onward spoke out vigorously and effectively against gambling, dueling, bull-fighting on the Sabbath Day, slavery, intemperance, brawling and disorder have been in notable numbers New England voices. Had no emigrants from Massachusetts or Vermont or Connecticut or New Hampshire ever crossed the Sierras or sailed through the Golden Gate, California might have been today in the possession of a foreign power or an independent republic. Those of New England descent gladly acknowledge what other loyal Californians have done for the state during these nearly seventy-five years since it was admitted to the Union. But they also rejoice that they, their fathers and grandfathers had a part in the upbuilding of the beautiful state that stretches from snow-crowned Shasta nine hundred miles to where the waves of the Pacific gently break upon the shores of San Diego.