The Montgomery advertiser., 1901-09-04
N. N' A''AiSe' Commonwealth of California.

citizens, assembled together, to proceed to the functions of seIf-goveynment.
 Commonwealth of California.
 Fortunately the military dominion was not actuated with an undue sense of esprit du corps, nor inclined to set itself against the wishes of the people. Main taining as was just, that the Mexican law should constitute the legal status peoples making. Governor Riley yielded to the popular demand and called at Mon terey. convention for the purpose of framing the Commonwealth of California. This body sat in Septt mbcr 1S49, drew up Constitution, In which. with unans- nous desire. slavery was excluded from the new State. and turned the results of the deliberations over to tho people for ratification in November Of the same year.
 The creation of the Commonwealth of California was an act of great political sagacity. Apart from the fact that it fur nished the basis for the erection on the Pacific slope of a society after the Amer ican type. 1t had furthermore the effect of cutting the knot of Congressional en- tanglement. of setting aside. forever the vexed question of California's territorial status with respect to the introduction of slavery. Her population was sufficient to justify. according to the ideas of The time. claim to statehood, and this demand. fortified further by the increasing import ance of her mineral products. was one which Congress, notwithstanding the op- position aroused among the Southern lead
 
 new Commonwealth. could not lightly set aside. After nearly year of parliament ary struggle and efforts toward compro. mise. President lent Fillmore; on the gu gun of which admitted California to the Union. A Great Difficulty.
 A task of greater difficulty remained. To formally erect a commonwealth and to obtain a ratification of this act from the national legislature was far easier than the subsequent labor of extending the Jurisdiction of the government thus constituted over vast and almost un- cred together from all parts of the world, representing many races and many ideals | of life and social duty. To digest and assimilate this heterogeneous mass was | the effort of the succeeding decade. The | grand obstacle to be overcome was the | ephemeral character of the population. | The average man who journeyed to Cali | fornia in the late '40s and the early 5cs | came for a single purpose. His household | goods were left behind in his Eastern home. whither he hoped to return and l end his days. His attachment to the political and social interests of the I'ew | State was therefore feeble. The charac- | small amount of capital invested iI tools, l the ease with which the prosp scting
 miner could pack his pan and camp | equipment and move onward to more promising fields were conditions which | gave to the early population of California
 a fuctuating and migratory character. | little adapted TOT the purposes or StaDle
 government. The nasty abandonment of | one mining camp and the sudden erection | of another at a distance from the earlier | centers of a population greatly increased | the difficulty which the government eX-
 perienced in extending its Jurisdiction. | The result as what might have been ex-
 pected. In the camps q rough and ready
 social compact was devised. just suf-
 ficient to satisfy the few needs of this
 primitive society. a kind of border justice, l which made the least demand upon the
 tV.fa | tered in the feverish search for gold. and
 nevertheless afforded such protection to life and property as made such occupa-
 ton possible.
 Mistaken Idea of Border Justice.
 Our impressions of early days in Cali
 "reminiscences of men who lived amid
 those stirring times and from the work of
 others who have sought in them material
 for fiction. In both instances the color
 ing is for obvious reasons unduly height
 ened. In the case of the observer, a man
 accustomed to the relative monotony of
 an older society, the exceptional occur
 rences impress themselves strongly upon
 the memory and come in the course of
 time to obscure the true relation of the
 exceptional to the ordinary The writer
 of fiction is perforoe a dealer in the ex-
 traordinary.
 More careful investigation has shown. | however, that border justice was neither
 ferocious nor sang,fnary. American ideas of justice prevailed. the culprit came be-
 fore jury of his peers; expulsion was 1 the rule and only in cases of repeated of | lending and well-esta blished guilt was the | death penalty eXacted
 Ii must he born in mind however. that
 the demands of frontier justice, especial | ly in mining camps. where accumulations | of great treasure in small bulk have no other safeguard than the vigilance of the Dossessor or the consensus of a rude society may afford, attribute an import
 ance to theft that under other crcum-
 stances would be unjustifable. It stands | next to murder in the category of crimes, | and it's swirl and summary punishment | could not fail to strike the imagination
 of men accustomed to the administration } of justice under less exceptional cond-
 tions.
 As California grew in permanent popu- | Iation the causes of disorder ceased. With the home and all that 1t implies , wife children. churches, schools and | social intercouse-men were stimulated to
 make greater efforts and sacrifices to obtain the comfort and security that reg uIated govornme mt affords. To this con tributed in no small degree the later pro- cesses in mining. The primitive pan and cradle gave way to costly fumes and | elaborate machinery for the reduction of l ore, demanding large investments of capi- f tai Those changes, together with the in-
 creasing interest in agriculture, gradually gave to the population of California, a ? Substantial and permanent character, be- fore which the elements of disorder dis Copyright 19OO)