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

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.