Year: 1868

we Suomlt Ior Inc peruSs oI I'll TUG ioHoWluB
incontrovertable statements by San Francisco
correspondent of the Cincinnati Commercial:


This city is California-yes, even the Pacific
slope-no less arbitrarily than Paris is France.
The gate Of Commerce is the front door of Fash-
of splendid, adventurous manhood swept upon
THESE snores, giving the worlds current history
some new, strange pages, and contributing to
sociai science many facts that were as good az


new, because they had been forgotten since the
ancient, unrecorded searches for gold TIE


brawny, bristling, elbowng community that
sprang here in what are called the early days
was an eddyng river of lusty human animals,
all ready to get rich and to get out all inspired
by the intense energy of sel6shness. That
miner was king who could work the longest and
stand the most water in his boots The weak
ling who had backaches and headaches, though
his brain was the largest and nimblest, had to
fall to the rear and do the cooking. case
knife to scrape the gold out of the crevices, and
pan to wash away the sand and clay were the
symbols of rank and he who could flourish
them the most hours out of the twenty-four was
the duke or the prince royal of California. Gold
was garnered by the ounce and the nugget, and
in that way, too, it was spent. The newspaper
from home caught at least pinch. The big
spree, in which the earnings of the son, the hus-
band or sweetheart was drowned sometimes
cost istful. Woman was eliminated from the
community. Society was harsh, unsteady, reck-
less, uproarious. "The States in those days
seemed so horribly distant that faint natures
perished of home-sickness, and evil natures
changed their names, blurred out old ties, and
began a new ma!evolent existence. Nature her
self was SO fresh and startling in California that
the early emigrants found it not hard to fancy
that they woke up in a new world, and that the
past had drifted into oblivion and left them abb
solved.


This is changed now, but California society
shows the scars of its early conflicts. The pres
ent proponderance of men over women is two to
one. The disproportion is still broad enough to
work evils and to foster all that is willful, un-
stable and wicked in the female heart. If the
San Francisco of to-day must have pseudonym,
let it be the "City of Scandal" This is a grace
less subject to write about, and shall barely
touch it with the lancet. If some American
Venillot wishes to 60 at the tumor with radical
intent and the whole case of surgical instru-
ments, be will find the field clear, and the ex-
cresence one whose successful excision will get
his name into the papers and into books. They
say (humorously, / presume,) that when, in
1850, the man on the lookout in San Francisco
Bay described sail approaching, he signaled
to it, Have you any women on board Z! ana
the answer, whatever it proved to be, was waved
up to Telegraph Hill and thence &c the hive of
men in the city below.


Woman here occupies, and has always occu-
pied, anomalous position. She enjoys every
facility to become a spoiled creature-spoiled
with petting and indulgence. Her yanhies are
hypertrophied her best impulses slumber.
That there are many women in California as
gentle, true, honest and noble as exist in the
world, l firmly and gladly believe but there is
undue multiplicity of adventuresses, and
worse. The region is crude, and of such is their
kingdo of plunder and Paradise.


Whatever the past may have been, and what
ever injury it may have done the present, society
in San Francisco is growing decisively
wholesome every year. The exterior society is
even more gay than in New York. The women
dress in the EXTREMIST fashion, and spend more
on their raiment than any other creatures in the
world.