e sardonic
jests that history has ever played may be found in this fact: that
there is a city which is of all cities the most typical of innovation
and dissipation, and a certain almost splendid vulgarity, and that this
city bears the name in a quaint old European language of the most
perfect exponent of the simplicity and holiness of the Christian
tradition; the city is called San Francisco. San Francisco, the capital
of the Bret Harte country, is a city typifying novelty in a manner in
which it is typified by few modern localities. San Francisco has in all
probability its cathedrals, but it may well be that its cathedrals are
less old and less traditional than many of our hotels. If its
inhabitants built a temple to the most primal and forgotten god of whose
worship we can find a trace, that temple would still be a modern thing
compared with many taverns in Suffolk round which there lingers a faint
tradition of Mr. Pickwick. And everything in that new gold country was
new, even to the individual inhabitants. Good, bad, and indifferent,
heroes and dastards, they were all men from nowhere.

Most of us have come across the practical problem of London landladies,
the problem of the doubtful foreign gentleman in a street of respectable
English people. Those who have done so can form some idea of what it
would be to live in a street full of doubtful foreign gentlemen, in a
parish, in a city, in a nation composed entirely of doubtful foreign
gentlemen. Old California, at the time of the first rush after gold, was
actually this paradox of the nation of foreigners. It was a republic of
incognitos: no one knew who anyone else was, and only the more
ill-mannered and uneasy even desired to know. In such a country as this,
gentlemen took more trouble to conceal their gentility than thieves
living in South Kensington would take to conceal their blackguardism. In
such a country everyone is an equal, because everyone is a stranger. In
such a country it is not strange if men in moral matters feel something
of the irresponsibility of a dream. To plan plans which are continually
miscarrying against men who are continually disappearing by the
assistance of you know not whom, to crush you know not whom, this must
be a demoralising life for any man; it must be beyond description
demoralising for those who have been trained in no lofty or orderly
scheme of right. Small blame to them indeed if they become callous and
supercilious and cynical