fice; shirking constantly and systematically all jury and other public
duty, which, onerous in every community, was doubly so, as they thought,
in that new country, they seemed never to reflect that there was a
portion, and that the worst, of the population, who would take advantage
of their remissness, and direct every institution of society to the
promotion of their own nefarious purposes.

Absorbed in their own pursuits, confident that a short time would enable
them to realize their great object of making a fortune and then leaving
the country, the better portion of the community abandoned the control
of public affairs to whoever might be willing or desirous to assume
it. Of course there was no lack of men who had no earthly objection to
assume all public duties and fill all public offices. Politicians void
of honesty and well-skilled in all the arts of intrigue, whose great end
and aim in life was to live out of the public treasury and grow rich by
public plunder, and whose most blissful occupation was to talk politics
in pot houses and groggeries; men of desperate fortunes who sought
to mend them, not by honest labor, but by opportunities for official
pickings and stealings; bands of miscreants resembling foul and unclean
birds which clamor and fight for the chance of settling down upon and
devouring the body to which their keen scent hag directed them; all were
astir and with but little effort obtained all that they desired. The
offices were thus filled by rapacious and unscrupulous men. The agents
who had helped to elect them, or impose them upon the people by
fraud, were supported and protected in their villainies; and in the
consciousness of impunity for crime, walked the streets heavily armed
and ready on the instant to exact a bloody revenge for an interference
with their infamous schemes, or an attempt to bring them to merited
punishment.

In San Francisco the effects of all this were visible at an early
period in the prevalence of crime and outrage; in the laxity with which
offenders were prosecuted; in the squandering of public property; the
increasing burden of taxation; and the insecurity of life and property.
Now and then when the evils of the system weighed with the most
depressing effect upon the business part of the community, some
spasmodic effort for a time produced a change. But a temporary check
only was applied. The snake was scotched, not killed. The ballot box
upon whose sanctity, in a Republ