WHEN a new comet is described, we set ourselves to trace 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 book they may be publishing, before the comet has had time with its tail to sweep all the types into "pi." 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 "pi;" and other Californias are looming in her wake, such as Australia and the South Sea islands, 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.

In the case of California, the most painful feature at the outset of the termashaw was the torpor manifested by all the governments of Christendom as to a phenomenon that was leading their countrymen by wholesale into ruin. Helpless and ignorant as that army of children, which, in an early stage of the Crusades, set forward by land for Palestine; knowing as little as those children, of the horrors that besieged the road, or of the disappointments that would seal its terminus, supposing it ever to be reached; from every quarter of Europe rushed the excited ploughman and artisan, as vultures on a day of battle to the supper of carrion and not a word of warning or advice from their government.

* i. e. by Missionaries in their dictionaries of the Sandwich language: but formerly better known to sailors as that Owhyhee, where Captain Cook was massacred.

On the continent this neglect had its palliation. Most governments were then too occupied by anxieties and agitations derived from the approaching future, or even by desperate convulsions derived from the present. But whither shall we look for the excuse of our own government? Some years ago, it was, by inconsiderate Radicals, made the duty of government to find work for the people. That was no part of their duty; nor could be; for it can be no duty to attempt impossibilities. But it was a part of their duty, officially, to publish remonstrances and cautions against general misapprehension of apparent openings, that too often were no real openings, for labor, and against a national delusion that for ninety-nine out of a hundred was sure to end in ruin. Two things government were bound to have done, viz., 1st., to have circulated a circumstantial account of the different routes to San Francisco, each with its separate distances assigned, and its separate varieties of inconceivable hardship; 2dly, to have sent out a party of surveyors and mineralogists, with instructions to report from time to time, at short intervals, upon the real condition of the prospects before the golddiggers, upon the comparative advantages of the several districts in California, as yet explored, with these mineral views, and upon the kind of labor, 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 nor 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 and a quarter millions of square miles* which it had reached last midsummer) produces a race of Barnums on a preAdamite scale, corresponding in activity to its own enormous proportions. The idea of a Barnum does not at all presuppose an element of fraud. There are many honorable Barnums; but also there is a minority of fraudulent Barnums. All alike, good Barnums and bad Barnums, are characterized by Titanic energy, such as would tear into ribbons a little island like ours, but is able to pull fearlessly against a great hulk of a continent, that the very moon finds it fatiguing to cross. Now, it happens that the bad Barnums took charge of the California swindle. They stationed a first-rate liar in San Francisco, under whom, and accountable to whom, were several accomplished liars distributed all the way down to Panama, and thence to Chagres. All along the Atlantic sea-board, this gathering volley of lies and Californian "notions" raced with the speed of gunpowder trains up to New York, in which vast metropolis (confounded amongst its seven hundred thousand citizens) burrowed the central bureau of the swindle. Thence in ten days these poetic hoaxes crossed over to a line of repeating liars posted in Liverpool and London, from which cities, of course, the lies ran by telegraph in a few hours over the European continent, and thence by Tartar expresses overland to Indus and the Ganges. When the swindle got into regular working order, it was as good as a comedy to watch its mode of playing. The policy of the liars was to quarrel with each other, and cavil about straws, for the purpose of masking the subterraneous wires of their fraudulent concert. Liar No. 5, for instance, would observe carelessly in a Panama journal, that things were looking up at Sacramento, for (by the latest returns that could be depended on) the daily product of gold had now reached a million of dollars. Upon which No. 8 at Chagres would quote the paragraph into a local paper, and comment upon it thus with virtuous indignation:

*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.

"Who or what this writer may be, with his daily million of dollars, we know not, and do not desire to know. But we warn the editor of that paper, that it is infamous to sport with the credulity of European emigrants. A million, índeed, daily! We, on the contrary, assert that the produce for the last three months, though steadily increasing, has never exceeded an average of half a million

and even that not to be depended on for more than nine days out of ten." To him succeeds No. 10, who, after quoting No. 8, goes on thus:-“ Some people are never content. To our thinking, half a million of dollars daily, divided amongst about 1400 laborers, working only seven hours a day, is a fair enough remuneration, considering that no education is required, no training, and no capital. Two ounces of tobacco and a spade, with rather a large sack for bagging the gold, having a chain and padlock-such is the stock required for a beginner. In a week he will require more sacks and more padlocks; and in two months a roomy warehouse, with suitable cellars, for storing the gold until the fall, when the stoutest steamers sail. But, as we observed, some people are never content. A friend of ours, not twelve miles from San Francisco, in digging for potatoes, stumbled upon a hamper of gold that netted 40,000 dollars. And, behold, the next comer to that locality went off in dudgeon because, after two days' digging, he got nothing but excellent potatoes; whereas he ought to have reflected that our friend's golden discovery was a lucky chance, such as does not happen to the most hardworking man above once in three weeks."

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Then came furious controversies about blocks of gold embedded in quartz, and left at "our office" for twenty-four hours, with liberty for the whole town to weigh and measure them. One editor affirms that the blocks weighed six quintals, and the quartz, if pulverized, would hardly fill three snuffboxes. But," says a second editor, "the bore of our friend's nostrils is preternaturally large; his pinch, being proportionable, averages three ounces: and three of his snuffboxes make one horse-bucket. Six tons, does he say? I don't believe, at the outside, it reaches seven hundredweight." Thereupon rejoins editor No. 1-"The blockhead has mistaken a quintal for a ton; and thus makes us talk nonsense. Of course we shall always talk nonsense, when we talk in his words and not in our own. His wish was to undermine us: but, so far from doing that, the knowing reader will perceive

unless he also knew that such enviable prizes were sown as thinly as twenty-thousandpound prizes in our English lotteries of the last generation.

Here, then, is the first thing to pause upon, viz., that however " handy" this gold may lie in California or in Australia, however "sweetly" it may work off for those meritorious vagabonds who first break ground in the virgin fields, one thing is undeniable that the course of further advance will not be upwards from good to better, but downwards from good or very good, or charming, to decent, to rather bad, and lastly, to disgusting. This is a very ugly fact; and the cunning amongst the workers, or rather amongst those who have something to sell amongst workers, attempt to break the force of this fact, by urging that as yet the aids of science and machinery have not been applied to the case; so that any advantage which is now possessed by the vagabonds must soon be greater. That is true: past denying it is that concert, and combination, and the resources of capital, will tell upon the gold-fields, and reduce the labor, which already is reduced by comparison with other gold-fields. Certainly, in the first stage of all, the progress will, by means of machinery, lie from good to better. But that momentary period of success will not avail to alter or to hide the ugly truth, that in all future stages-that is, in every stage subsequent to that in which the gold is found upon the surface the inverse course must take place, that is, not from good to better, but from good to something continually worse. What is it that ultimately and irresistibly determines the value of gold? Why is it, for instance, that in modern times gold has generally ranged at about fifteen times the value, weight for weight, of silver? Is it, as ignorant people fancy, because there is fifteen times as much silver in the market of the world as there is of gold? Not at all, my poor benighted friend: it is because any given quantity of gold, say a hundred weight, requires fifteen times as much labor (or, more comprehensively, fifteen times as much capital) to bring it to market than an equal quantity of silver; and nothing will permanently alter that ratio but what alters the quantity of labor involved in one or the other; and nothing can permanently reduce the value of gold but what reduces the cost of bringing it to market. Now I defy any vagabond whatever, whether old vagabond of California, or young vagabond of Australia, or younger vagabond of Owhyhee, or

most young vagabond of South America, to deny that his labor is at the best (i. e. is most productive) when it is starting. His first crop of gold is taken off the surface, as with us poor old women and children are hired at sixpence a-day to pick stones off the land. Next comes the ploughman: it begins to be hard work, my friend, that ploughing for gold. And, finally comes the sinking of shafts, and going down for hours into mephitic regions of carbonic acid gas, and after damp, &c. Neither is there any dispensation from this necessity of going downwards from bad to worse, except in the single case of crushing quartz. Machinery must prodigiously facilitate that labor; and so long as the quartz holds out, that advantage will apparently last. But this quartz must, I suspect, be one of the rare prizes in the lottery; and amongst quartz itself, as amongst vagabonds, there will be a better and a worse. And the signs of these differences will soon become familiar, and the best will be taken first; and thus here again the motion forward will be from bad to worse.

But now, as I can afford to be liberal, and leave myself ample means, in Yankee phrase, to "whip" the vagabonds after all, let me practice the graceful figure of concession. I will concede, therefore, what most vehemently I doubt, that for a few years these new gold-fields should work so kindly as seriously to diminish the cost of producing marketable gold. In that case, mark what will follow. You know the modern doctrine of rent, reader? Of course you do, and it would be presumption in me to doubt your knowing it. But still, for the sake of a foolish caprice that haunts me, suffer me to talk to you as if you did not know the doctrine of rent.*

I will state it in as brief a compass as perhaps is possible. In a new colony, having a slender population, the natural order in which the arable land is taken up must be this: in the first stage of the process, none but the best land will be cultured; which land let us class as No. 1. In the second stage, when population will have expanded, more wheat, and therefore more land, being wanted, the second best will be brought into culture; and this we will call No. 2. In the third stage, No. 3, will be

*Very grievously, I suspect myself here of plagiarism from Moliere. In one of his plays, Mons. Y. says to Mons. X., "You understand Greek, I believe? To which Mons. X. replies-“ Oh, yes, I understand Greek perfectly. But have the goodness, my dear friend, to talk to me as if by chance I did not understand Greek."