The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1895-06-08
CALIFORNIA VIEWED BY A PESSI-
MIST.

The contempt of law and low tone of
public morals in the state of California,
and particularly in the city of San Fran
cisco, has passed into national proverb.
Nobody is hanged for murder in Califor-
mia. Durrant probably will be acquitted
for want of conclusive evidence, and il is
just as well that he should be. Were the
evidence ever so complete he would eS-
cape execution by some legal trick and
secure a pardon through political infiu-
ence after a brief imprisonment.
California does not take crime serious
~. Public law is held in as great con-
tempt as private morals. The lax social
customs that winked at making a church
an observation-disclosures before it was made
a Slaughter-houSe have the same root as
the diseased public sentiment which
makes heroes of train-robbers and muir
derers, and the intellectual degenera ton
which makes that community a. prey of
every fantastic delusion, from Christian
science to fiat money. In spite of many
individual instances of high intelligence
and moral Vigor, the community, as
whole, lacks the sound fiber of law-abid-
ing, crime-repressing, order-loving and
self-respecting communities.
The reason is plain enough. California
is under the hereditary curse of a penal
colony. Like Virginia in the seventeenth,
Louisiana in the eighteenth and Austria
liza in the nineteenth century, ii was peo-
pied with persons of loose morals and
small respect for law, whose capacities
and tendencies are inherited by their de-
ScendantS. California, in the fftleS, was
a voluntary penal colony-a place of well
come refuge and willing exile for men
and women for whom existence in order
ly and moral communities had become
impossible or uncomfortable.
ConvictS and loose women were shipped
from England and France to Virginia and
Louisiana Criminals were turned loose
in Australia after completing their terms
of transportation. These tainted those
new countries with corruption that gener-
ations of more regular living and whole
some admixture could not cure. 1t TOOK
q
faint still clings about Louisiana in the
shape of a tendency to lawlesS outbreak
and reckless, private living; to POLITICAL
Sheridan's banditu are the lineal descend
ants of the French scum dumped into
Louisiana $50 years ago. The destructive
socialism and political folly that run riot
in Australia engeEdered in the morbid hu
man strata deposited there in penal-col-
ony times to become the base of a new
civilization.
What selfish and brutal state policy did
for these unfortunate communities the
chance of gold discoveries in California
did for that state, 1t was a fertile, pas
toral country, thinly peopled with inferior
races. The bait of gold drew to it such
horde of reckless adventures as never
has fallen upon region in modern times.
The social chaos that resulted from this
sudden occupation invited other hordeS of
men and women who sought wealth less
than obscurity. All manner of social out
casts joStled each other in a fevered at
mosphere that fostered in them the germs
of moral decay. The California of the SOS
contained more unpromising human mate
rial than ever was round IN avoWed penal
colonies, because is drew not the scum
of a single state, but the refuse of the
world.
These people increased and multiplied
after the manner of their kind, and their
physical and spiritual inheritors fill Cali
fornia today. There has been vast moral
gain, with substitution of a settled urban
and pastoral population for the rowing
gold-hunters of the sos. There has been
wholesome admixture of blood, too. the
evil often mating with the sound instead
of with each other. But one generation
is not enough TO remove the moral faint.
IT probably will be a century from the
date of it's settlement before California
will be free: in PUBLIC standards and pub
lie morals, from the hereditary corruption
of its founders.-From the Portland Ore
gonian.