lifornia should be "slave" or
"free"; of the doubt and uncertainty as to the status of California-made
law pending some action by the Federal Congress; of how the Federal
Congress, with masterly inactivity and probably some slight skittishness
as to mingling in the slavery argument, had adjourned without doing
anything at all! So California had to take her choice of remaining under
military governorship or going ahead and taking a chance on having her
acts ratified later. She chose the latter course. San Jose was selected
as the capital. Nobody wanted to serve in the new legislature; men
hadn't time. There was the greatest difficulty in getting assemblymen.
The result was that, with few exceptions, the first legislature of
fifty-two members was composed of cheap professional politicians from
the South, and useless citizens from elsewhere. This body was then in
session. It was invariably referred to as "The Legislature of the
Thousand Drinks." I heard discussed numberless schemes for its control
for this or that purpose; many of them, it seemed to me, rather
unscrupulous.

These big men of the city talked of other things besides politics. From
them I heard of the state of commercial affairs, with its system of
consignments and auctions, its rumours of fleet clipper ships, its
corners of the market, its gluttings with unforeseen cargoes of
unexpected vessels, and all the other complex and delicate adjustments
and changes that made business so fascinating and so uncertain. All
these men were filled with a great optimism and an abiding enthusiasm
for the future. They talked of plank roads, of sewers, of schools,
churches, hospitals, pavements, fills, the razing of hills, wharves,
public buildings, water systems; and they talked of them so soberly and
in such concrete terms of accomplishment that the imagination was
tricked into accepting them as solid facts. Often I have gone forth from
listening to one of these earnest discussions to look about me on that
wind-swept, sandblown, flimsy, dirty, sprawling camp they called a city,
with its half dozen "magnificent" brick buildings that any New England
village could duplicate, and have laughed wildly until the tears came,
over the absurdity of it. I was young. I did not know that a city is not
bricks but men, is not fact but the vitality of a living ideal.

There were, of course, many other men than those I have named, and of
varied temperaments and beliefs. Some of them were h