There are a hundred ways to measure a man's soul
— hy the size of his gift ; by the breadth of his self-
denial for the sake of others ; by the command over self;
by the devotion to a cause ; by the powers of endur-
ance; by magnanimity or meanness— and all the rest.
Wherever the achievement of stubborn fact is subordi-
nated to the tickling of a fancy there is sure to be cheat-
ing and quackery. A school professing superior man-
ners is not usually renowned as a seat of learning ; a
temperance hotel is proverbially the poorest of inns, and
a journal of extra high morality is a poor newspaper.
What had California to do ? Everything. There was the bare stretch of earth, nothing more. It was a paradise for wild men, but for civilization's pets it must be swept and garnished. After a day of gold- diiiQriiio; a o'overnment must be established, lands cul- tivated, and by and by cities built, with their streets, sewers, churches, houses of prostitution, schools, gambling shops, hospitals, and jails. And while all this is going on, in addition to money-making and family-rearing, what time shall then be left for the more refined culture?
Tossinofs hither and thither, tossino-s to the larboard and to the starboard of the ship of experience, down- falls and kicks u^^ward, flesh-tearings, bone-raspings, pride-tamings, and the rest— all this is the digging and fertilization that makes the barren tree to yield fair fruit. Foreign winds blow fresh experience, and with the frostino; of the hair the brain is made clear. Yet all of this in those young days was but a cos in- geniorum, a whetstone for the wits.
There was here in its warmest mood, circumscribed between beo-innino-s and ends, that first element of progress, change. Like all the elements of matter, like all the forces of nature, men labored in unrest. Nothing was fixed, nothing was in repose. Launched from the shores of time into the boundless sea of the eternities, they could still hear the cries of birth mincrling: with the moans of death.
