midleg or dust that took you thigh deep:
now, the public ways are properly made,
moderately well cared for, and, at least, allow
of safe circulation. Following from the buildings
to their inmates, we see just as striking
an improvement in the society as in the
dwellings of San Francisco. The unlicensed
bachelorhood has become modified, if not
wholly extinct: its worst features have been
softened, its crime has been repressed, and its
rowdyism is now brought into decent bounds.
Families have begun to settle in the city, and
women may now be seen in the streets as
safe and respected as anywhere in Europe.
This fact alone speaks volumes, both for the
greater social order of the place and for the
re-acting moral influence which they have
introduced; for no society is wholly evil
wherein noble and virtuous women live with
safety, with respect, and with influence. It
is only when they withdraw that men are
given over to unreserved iniquity. This
better state of things is due, says Mr. Seyd,
in a recently published work on California,
to the much abused and much misrepresented
Vigilance Committee organised in eighteen,
hundred and fifty-six. Disgusted with the
inefficiency—some say with the crimes—of the
government; alarmed at the absence of all
law, both of prevention or of punishment—in
eighteen hundred and fifty-six the inhabitants
of San Francisco rose in a mass, organised an
army of six thousand men, which was divided
into infantry, cavalry, and heavy artillery;
took the law and its administration into their
own hands; caught and executed some half-dozen
proved murderers; enacted severe
laws against theft and violence; put down
gambling houses; regulated the hours of the
drinking saloons; cleared the country of
some of the more notorious scoundrels, and
placed the other scoundrels under such stringent
and uncomfortable social rules that they
soon "cleared out" of their own accord;
accepted and paid the state debt of three
millions of dollars, secretly and illegally
contracted by an unscrupulous Governor;
deposed him and elected another in his stead,
who is now in office; laid in very fact, the
foundations, and built up that wonderful
fabric, of present San Franciscan society out
of the unpromising materials under their
hands. The discovery of the gold fields of
Australia, and the breaking out of the
Russian war, doubtless aided them; for the
floating particles of restless vagabondism
swam off into those streams, as something
newer; and soon the tide of emigration from
San Francisco was stronger than that of
immigration to it. The Californians were
well rid of their guests, though the labour
market rose inconveniently, and servants'
wages cost a handsome fortune in themselves.
At present, about ten thousand miners
annually leave the state enriched; though
forty per cent. fewer exist in it than in former
years. Many of these have turned farmers,
merchants, graziers, &c., to the unlimited
advantage of tlie state and the community in
general.

The effect of home agriculture and home
manufacture is becoming distinctly visible in
the trade statistics of exports and imports, in
the stability of the markets, in the natural
balance of supply and demand, and in the
comfort and well-being of the people. When the
gold fever first broke out, the operations of
trade were in a most chaotic state. When
men poured by thousands into that little
village of twenty-four houses, it can easily be
understood that a very short time found them
in utter destitution of all the necessaries of life,
though in the presence of an amount of
bullion that would have bought up half the
markets of Europe. The commercial formula
was next accomplished, and the demand
obtained the supply. But California made men
mad. She was the very Circe in the world of
trade, and no one who dealt with her in any
way whatsoever seemed to preserve his
reason. The fabulous rates of interest which
the first importers obtained from men drunk
with gold and destitute of all else, turned the
brains of half the shipping merchants in the
world. No one seemed to reflect or to study, to
look at what had gone before, or to calculate
what remained behind: all were only eager to
pour goods into California, and to make an
usurer's fortune on a single venture. The
consequence was, that, after paying a dollar for
an onion or a potato, a small fortune for a pair
of boots, and a ransom for a bottle of lemonade;
after literally eating gold in the simplest
dinner that could be given to a hungry man,
and being obliged to sue like beggars and
pay like princes in the stores, the buyers
had it all to themselves: the markets were
glutted, goods lay rotting in the streets, and
men, who had shipped their all, expecting to
make hundreds per cent., were eager to sell
their stores at the most ridiculous sums, and
thought themselves well off if they were able
to save a few pence in the pound. The waste
and destruction of commodities were frightful.
Articles, which at first would have commanded
their weight in gold, now lay shrivelling under
the sun, perfectly secure from theft, among a
population who could not have made use of
them at a gift, owing to their being themselves
overstocked. It was the most striking
though melancholy spectacle to see this waste
of property, where so short a time before
there had been such urgent need and
demand. Boxes, bales of tobacco and all sorts of
dry goods were sunk under the dust and the
mud of the thoroughfares; and often, to
this day, workmen making or repairing the
roads, come upon boxes of rotten tobacco,
or upon bales of spoiled clothes, which were
left to destruction simply because there
were neither buyers nor wearers. Take
butter alone:—the importation was so
excessive in proportion to the consumers,
that every one must have eaten three and a