e
commercial sense of working as partners, I do not know, nor is it
material to know. The result sounded enormous, when stated in a
fragmentary way with reference to particular days, and possibly in
reference also to particular persons, distinguished for luck, but on
taking the trouble to sum up the whole amount of labourers, of days, and
of golden ounces extracted, it did not appear that the wages to each
individual could have averaged quite so much as twenty shillings a week,
supposing the total product to have been on that principle of
participation. Very possibly it was _not_; and in that case the gains of
some individuals may have been enormous. But a prudent man, if he quits
a certainty or migrates from a distance, will compute his prospects upon
this scale of averages, and assuredly not upon the accidents of
exceptional luck. The instant objection will be, that such luck is _not_
exceptional, but represents the ordinary case. Let us consider. The
reports are probably much exaggerated; and something of the same
machinery for systematic exaggeration is already forming itself as
operated so beneficially for California. As yet, however, it is not
absolutely certain that the reports themselves, taken literally, would
exactly countenance the romantic impressions drawn from those reports by
the public.

Until the reader has checked the accounts, or, indeed, has been enabled
to check them, by balancing the amount of gain against the amount of
labour applied, he cannot know but that the reports themselves would
show on examination a series of unusual successes set against a series
of entire failures, so as to leave a _facit_, after all corrections and
allowances, of moderately good wages upon an equal distribution of the
whole. I would remind him to propose this question: has it been
asserted, even by these wild reports, with respect to any thousand men
(taken as an aggregate), I do not mean to say that all have succeeded,
or even that a majority have not failed decisively--that is more than I
demand--but has it been asserted that they have realized so much in any
week or any month as would, if divided equally amongst losers and
winners, have allowed to each man anything conspicuously above the rate
of ordinary wages? Of lotteries in general it has been often remarked,
that if you buy a single ticket you have but a poor chance of winning,
if you buy twenty tickets your chance is very much worse, and if you buy
all the ti