HOGG'S

INSTRUCTOR.

CALIFORNIA.

BY THOMAS DE QUINCEY.

WHEN a new comet is descried, we set ourselves to trace, mineralogists, with instructions to report from time to time, the path on which it is moving; so that, if it seems likely to trespass on our own orbit, prudent men may have warning to make all snug aloft, and ready for action; authors, in particular, seeking to correct the proofs of any bock they may be publishing, before the comet has had time with its tail to sweep all the types into 'pye.' It is now becoming a duty to treat California as a comet; for she is going ahead at a rate that beats Sinbad and Gulliver, threatening (if we believe the star-gazers of our day) to throw universal commerce into 'pye;' and other Californias are looming in her wake, such as Australia and the South Sea island now called Hawaii: they are crowding all sail towards the same object of private gain and public confusion; anxieties are arising in various quarters; and it is daily becoming more a matter of public interest to assign the course upon which they are really advancing, and to measure the dangers (if any at all) with which they are practically charged.

at short intervals, upon the real condition of the prospects before the gold-diggers, upon the comparative advantages of the several districts in California as yet explored, with these mineral views, and upon the kind of labours, and the kind of tools or other apparatus, that had any reasonable chance of success. Had this been done, some myriads of energetic and enterprising men, that have long since perished miserably, would have been still available for the public service. California, be its real wealth what it may, was a 'job;' a colossal job; and was worked as a job by a regular conspiracy of jobbers. The root of this conspiracy lay and lies (in all senses lies) up and down the United States. It is no affront, nor intended as such, to the American Union or to Mr Barnum, if I say that this gigantic republic (which, by the seventh census, just now in the course of publication, has actually extended its territorial compass in a space of ten years from about two

millions of square miles, which it had in 1840, to three In the case of California, the most painful feature at the and a quarter millions of square miles which it had outset of the termashaw was the torpor manifested by all reached last midsummer) produces a race of Barnums the governments of Christendom as to a phenomenon that on a pre-Adamite scale, corresponding in activity to its as leading their countrymen by wholesale into ruin. own enormous proportions. The idea of a Barnum does Helpless and ignorant as that army of children, which in not at all presuppose an element of fraud. There are an early stage of the Crusades set forward by land for many honourable Barnums; but also there is a minority Palestine; knowing as little as those children of the horrors of fraudulent Barnums. All' alike, good Barnums and bad that besieged the road, or of the disappointments that Barnums, are characterised by Titanic energy, such as would seal its terminus, supposing it ever to be reached; would tear into ribbons a little island like ours, but is able from every quarter of Europe rushed the excited plough- to pull fearlessly against a great hulk of a continent, that man and artisan, as vultures on a day of battle to the the very moon finds it fatiguing to cross. Now, it hapsupper of carrion: and not a word of warning or advice pened that the bad Barnums took charge of the California from their government. On the continent this neglect had swindle. They stationed a first-rate liar in San Francisco, te palliation. Most governments were then too occupied under whom, and accountable to whom, were several acby anxieties and agitations derived from the approaching complished liars distributed all the way down to Panama, future, or even by desperate convulsions derived from the and thence to Chagres. All along the Atlantic sea-bord, present. But whither shall we look for the excuse of our this gathering volley of lies and Californian notions' pan government? Some years ago, it was, by inconsiderate raced with the speed of gunpowder trains up to New York, Radicals, made the duty of government to find work for in which vast metropolis (confounded amongst its seven the people. That was no part of their duty; nor could hundred thousand citizens) burrowed the central bureau be; for it can be no duty to attempt impossibilities. But of the swindle. Thence in ten days these poetic hoaxes it was a part of their duty, officially, to publish remon- crossed over to a line of repeating liars posted in Liverpool strances and cautions against general misapprehension of and London, from which cities, of course, the lies ran by apparent openings, that too often were no real openings, telegraph in a few hours over the European continent, and for labour, and against a national delusion that for ninety- thence by Tartar expresses overland to Indus and the nine out of a hundred was sure to end in ruin. Two Ganges. When the swindle got into regular working things government were bound to have done, viz., 1st, to order, it was as good as a comedy to watch its mode of have circulated a circumstantial account of the different playing. The policy of the liars was to quarrel with each routes to San Francisco, each with its separate distances other, and cavil about straws, for the purpose of masking assigned, and its separate varieties of inconceivable hard- the subterraneous wires of their fraudulent concert. ship; 2dly, to have sent out a party of surveyors and

I quote from an abstract of the census in the New York Journal of Commerce,' for December 5, 1851, transmitted by an American friend before it had been published even in the Washington journals,

This estimate does not include a vast extent of watery domains.