croakers
enough, who saw nothing but disastrous terminations of a social organization begun on such a low and sor- did basis; who were alwa^^s pointing to haunts of li- centiousness, to drinking and gambling saloons, to ballot-box stuffing, public debt, political wickedness, and vigilance committees, to police reports and all the dismal paraphernalia of vice, as if these were Califor- nia and the basis of Californian society.
Thus it was that for a quarter of a century in foreign parts and on our eastern seaboard, California was but imperfectly understood. After all the toning down and polishing up which society was destined here to undergo, in the minds of the distant multitude we were still the same lawless, godless crew that enacted the Inferno of 1849. And we asked how long we were to suffer the stigma and lie under the cloud ; how long our elastic energies must turn and overturn before our foreign friends could see us as we were ? We asked the question in the fifties and received our answer in the eig^hties. In this continued miscon- ception of our character we may, however, more fully recognize how deep was the impression made by the discovery of gold. Roused to its remotest corners by the mill-race diggers' shout, the world in one glance fixed in its stolid brain the shocking nightmare that followed, and there the impression remained. And in truth enough even now remains of the old sulphuric smells and pitchy infirmities to modify somewhat our pride ; but in that great day when our friends across the Atlantic and across the Pacific shall have made white all their robes, even as those of the daughters of ^ger and Rana, may not the children of pioneers, and the survivors of the early pandemonium hope to have achieved in their eyes a change of raiment?
We have much to say of life in California ; not so much of death ; and yet all Californians die. In early times rum, exposure, and disease not being sufficient, they all used to carry revolvers to kill each other with. Ask them why they carried the man-killing
