The Press. — London, England, 1857-03-21 00:00:00

28g. fornians. The De► by-day. or a battle, or a scene in the House of Commons, or a Tamburini row at the Opera, or the interior of a gaming -house, offer strong and striking subjects for describers, but we should soon be surfeited with them. No reading is so monotonous as the Newgate Calendar ; anti whenever we take up a work oa California we are sure to meet with stereotyped desperadoes, and familiar portraits of classes which we could willingly forget. in fact., California has become a barrel organ subject for " travellers." Amongst the solid portions of this volume we find the following apology for " Lynch law " For those whose ideas of the proper mode of adminis tering criminal law are only acquired from an acquaint ance with the statistics of crime and its punishment iu such countries as England, where a single murder excites horror throughout the kingdom, and is for days a matter of public interest, where judicial corruption is unknown, where the instruments of the lsw are übiquitous, and its action all but infallible—tor such persons it may be diffi cult to realise a state of things which should render it necssary, or even excusable, that any number of irrespon sible individuals should exercise a power of life and death over their fellow-men. And no doubt runny smut! theories may be brought forward against the propriety of adminiatering Lynch law: but California, in the state of society which then existed, and in view of the total inefficiency, or worse than inefi• ciencv, of the established courts of justice, was no place for theorising upon abstract principles. Society hail to protect itself by the most practical and unsophisticated system of retributive justice, quick in its action, and whose operation, being totally divested of all mystery and unnecessary ceremony, was perfectly comprehensible to the meanest understanding—a system inconsistent with public safety in old countries—unnecessary, in fact, where the machinery of the law is perfect in all its harts— . but at the same time one which men most naturally adopt in the absence of all other protection ; and any one who hied in the mines of California at that time is hound gratefully to acknowledge that the feeling of security of life and person which he there enjoyed was due in a great measure to his knowledge of the fact that this admirable institution of Lynch law was in full and active operation. Mr. Borthwiek's notions of the elite of Cali fornia are worth recording:— There were in California the elite of the most desperate and consummate scoundrels front every part of the world ; and the unsettled state of the country, the wandering habits of the mining population. scattered, as they were, all over the mountains, and frequently carrying en amount of gold on their persons inconvenient from its very weight, together with the isolated condition of many individuals, strangers to every one around them, and who, it' put out of the way. would never have been missed—all these things tendedi apparently to render the country one where such rotlians would have ample room to practise their villany. But, thanks to Lynch law, murders and robberies, nume• rous as they were, were by no means of such frequent cccurrenee as might have been (-sowed, considering the opportunities and temptations afforded to such a large proportion of the population, who were only restrained from violence from a wholesome regard fur the safety of their own necks. The author argues out the Lynchian code : And after all, the fear of punishment of death is the most effectual preventive of crime. To the class of men among whom murderers are found, it is probably the only feeling which deters them, and its influence is uncon soionsl• felt even by those whose sense of right and wrong is oot yet so dead as to allow them to contemplate the possibility of their committing a murder. In old States, however, fear of the punishment of death does not set with its full force on the mind of the intending criminal, for the idea of the expiation of his crime on the scaffold has to be preceded in his imagination by all the mysterious and tedious formalities of the law, in the uncertainty of which he is apt to flitter himself that he will by some means get an acquittal; and even if convicted, the length of time which must elapse before his ultimate punishment, to gether with the parade and circumstance with which it is attended, divests it in a great measure of the feelings of horror which it is intended to arouse. But when I,vneh law prevails, - iistrikes terror to the heart of the ecil•doer. He has no hazy anti undefined view of his ultimate fate in the distant future, but a vivid pic ture is before him of the sure and speedy consequence of crime. The formalities and Belays of the law, which are instituted :or the protection of the people, are for the same reason aMdi.hr . anti the mintitial knows that, instead of being tri••tl by the elaborate and intricate process of law, his very i morence of which leads him to over•eastimate his chance of escape, he will have to stand before a tribunal of ;nen, who will try him, not by law, but by hard, straight forward c tromon sense, and from whom he can hope for no other ter lict than that which his own conscience awards Lim ; while execution tl h so close upon sentence, that it forms, as it were, but part of the same ceremony : for tialifornians were eminently practical and earnest ; what they meant to do they did " right off," with all their might, and as if th e y really meant to do it ; and Lynch law was administered with characteristic promptness and decision. Sufficient time, however, or at least what was considered to ho sufficient time. WAS always granted to the criminal to prepare for death. Very frequently he was not hanged till the day &Bering trial. In justice to th© •" land of the West" w•e must recollect that America can boast of the THE PRESS. Livingston code, which is of a different character from that extemporised by Mr. Justice Lynch. Some of the gambling•rooms at California aro well described by the author; but we do not like gazing on that class of pictures. The revolting character of the personages who throng them is seen in the following striking sketch : Occasionally one saw, jostled about unresistingly by the crowd, and as if the crowd ignored its existence, the live ca, case of some wretched, dated, woe-begone man, clad in the worn-out greasy habiliments of quondam gentility ; the glass). unintelligent eye looking as if no focus could be found for it, but as if it saw a dim misty vision of every thing all at once ; the only meaning in the face being about the lips, where still lingered the smack of grateful enjoy ment of the last mouthful of whisky, blended with a longing humble sigh for the speedy recurrence of any op portunity of again experiencing such an awakening bliss, and forcibly expressing an unquenchable thirst for strong drinks, tlgether with the total absence of all power to do anything towards relieving it, while the whole appearance of she man spoke of bitter disappointment and reverses, without the force to bear up under them. He was the picture of sottish despair, and the name of his duplicates was legion. Mr. Borthwiek's description of the Chinese camp at Mississippi Bar is curious. He writes : There were about a hundred and fifty of them 'here, living in a perfect village of small tents, all clustered together on the rot.ks. They had a claim in the bed of the river, which they were working by means of a wing dam. A " wing dam," I may here mention, is one which first runs half-way across the river, then down the river' and back again to the same side, thus damming off a portion of its bed without toe necessity of the more ex• pensive operation of lifting up the whole river bodily in a " flume." The Chinamen's dam was two or three hundred yards in length, and was built of large pine•trees laid cne on the top of the other. They must have had great difficulty in handling such immense logs in such a place ; but they are exceedingly ingenious in applying mechanical power, particularly in concentrating the force of a large number of men upon one point. There were Chinamen of the better class among them, w:io no doubt directed the work, and paid the common men very poor wages—poor at least for California. A Chinaman could be hired for two, or at most three dollars a day by any one who thought their labour worth so much; but those at work here were most likely paid at a still lower rate, fur it was well known that whole shiploads of Chinamen came to the country under a species of bond• age to some of their wealthy countrymen in San Fran. cisco, who, immediately on their arrival, shipped them off to the mines under charge of an agent. keeping them completely under control by some mysterious celestial influence, quite independent of the laws of the country. The author thought that the Chinese were a distinct class, which enriched itself at the expense of the rest of the community, without contributing in a commensurate degree to the prosperity of their neighbours. But the same remark may be made on every half-advanced or interior race in presence of superior civili sation. That the Chinese are not the barba rians represented by our Premier is evident from the following ne,!ount:— This claim on the Yuba was the greatest undertaking I ever saw attempted by them. They expended a vast deal of unnecessary labonr in their method of working, and their individual labour, in etfect, was as nothing compared with that of other miners. A company of fifteen or twenty white men would have wing -dammed this claim, and worked it out in two or three months, while here were about a hundred and fifty China men humbugging round it all the season, and still had not worked one half the ground. Their mechanical contrivances were not in the usual rough straightforward style of the mines: they were curious, and very elaborately got up. but extremely wasteful of labour, and, moreover, very inetfactive. The pumps which they had at work here were an in stance of this. They were on the principle of a chain pump, the chain being formed of pieces of wood about six inches long, hingeing on each other, with crosspieces in the middle for buckets, having about six square inches of surface. The hinges fitted exactly to the spokes of a small wheel, which was turned by a Chinaman at each side of it working a miniature treadmill of four spokes on the same axle. As specimens of joiner•work they were very pretty, but as pumps they were ridiculous ; they threw a mere driblet of water: the chain was not even encased in a box—it merely lay in a slanting trough, so that more than one half the capacity of the buckets was lost. An American miner, at the expenditure of one-tenth part of the labour of making such toys, would have set a water-wheel in the river to work an elevating pump, which. would have thrown more water in half an hour than four and-twenty Chinamen could throw in a day with a dozen of these gitu-crack contrivances. Their camp was wonder fully clean : when I passed through it I found a great many of them at their toilet, getting their heads shaved, or plaiting each other's pigtails ; but most of them were at dinner. squatting on the rocks in groups of eight or ten round a number of curious little black pots and dishes. trcm whi they helped themselves with their chopsticks. In the centre was a large bowl of rice. This is their staple article, and they devour it most voraciously. Throw iug back their heads, they hold a large cupful to their SATURDAY, wide-open mouths, and, with a quick motion of the chop sticks in the other hand, they cause the rice to flow down their throats in a continuous stream. I received several invitations to dinner, but declined the pleasure, preferring to he a spectator. The rice looked well enough, and the rest of their dishes were no doubt very clean, but they had a very dubious appearance, and were far from suggesting the idea of being good to eat. In the store I found the storekeeper lying asleep on a mat. He was a sleek dirty-looking object, like a fat pig with the hair scalded otf, his head being all close shaved excepting the pigtail. liis opium pipe lay in his hand, and the lamp still burning beside him, so I hupposed he was already iu the seventh heavens. " The camp was wonderfully clean ;'• and cleanliness is a high test of culture and pro gress. Several pages of this agreeable volume con tain graphic descriptions like the following scene at San Francisco Troops of newly arrived Frerchmen marched along ru route for the mines, staggering under their equipment of knapsacks. shovels, picks, tin wash bowls, pistols, knives, swords, and double•barrel guns—their blankets slung over their shoulders, and their persons hung around with tin cups, frying-pans, coffee-pots, and other culinary utensils, with perhaps a hatchet and a spare pair of boots. Crowds of Chinamen were also to be seen, bound for the diggings, under gigantic basket hats, each man with a bamboo hid across his shoulder, from both ends of which were sus pended a higgledy-piggledy collection of mining tools, Chinese baskets and boxes, immense boots, and a variety of Chinese " fixins," which no one but a Chinaman could tell the use of,—all speaking at once, gabbling and chatter. ing their horrid jargon, and producing a noise like th a of a flock of geese. There were continuous streams of drays drawn by splendid horses, and loaded with merchandise from all parts of the world, and horsemen galloped about, equally regardless of their own and of other men's lives. It is a volume of pictorial scenes, and based upon reality. But we must say that there is danger of matter being sacrificed to manner by pictorial describers. In the lamented Eliot Warburton's " Crescent and the Cross" there was plenty of subject and spirit united. The author did not sink into the artist; and downright facts, and enough of them, are necessary to every book of travels. With these abatements we are justified in recom mending this volume as highly readable, and we expect still better things from the writer's graphic and vivacious pen. A First Present for iVaral Cadets. Being a Father's Advice to his Son on his Joining a Ship. By a Captain R.N. Portsea: Wood ward and San. FEW persons acquainted with our busy sea ports, or that marvellous piece of organisation, a man of-war, can have failed to observe with something deeper than curiosity the pretty gentlemanly boys who wear the midshipman's uniform of her Majesty's navy. Those children, whose elder brothers are still learn ing Latin grammar and dreaming of " stick ups " as a glory yet to come, are nevertheless invested with the duties, the responsibilities, and the freedom of men, and are every day exercising largo authority over weatherbeateu seamen old enough to be their grandfathers. And a noble school it is; requiring as it does the full play of qualities so diverse and in valuable ; habits of command and of subordi nation ; of obedience and responsibility ; of promptitude, conrage, order, and self-reliance. But it is not without its dangers; the perils and temptations which beset an inexperienced lad on first joining the gun-room mess are neither few nor light, and this short " Letter to a Naval Cadet." written for the author's own son, who was about to go to sea, has been published "in the hope that an elementary " knowledge of their position, duties, and " responsibilities, may enable the naval cadets " to avoid the shoals and quicksands upon " which so many promising lads have been " wrecked in their first voyage." Accordingly. in the small compass of twenty-two pages, all that a youngster has to do, and the best way of doing it, is set forth in the simplest lan guage. The division of his time, the direction of his studies. the demands upon his purse — in short, his duty to himself, his superiors, and his country, all find a place. coupled always with the appeal to the one great motive, "Do your duty, because it is your " duty to God, and then von will be sure to do "it well. - He re are no cu t-and-dried generali ties ; no vague platitudes about " honour " and " glory " ; no attempts to rouse or to stimulate that sort of ambition which, save in the rarest