The Possibility Of The Unearned Increment Is A Great Factor In The
Social Evolution Of California.
Its influence has been widespread,
persistent, and, in most regards, baneful.
The Anglo-Saxon first came to
California for gold to be had for the picking up. The hope of securing
something for nothing, money or health without earning it, has been the
motive for a large share of the subsequent immigration. From those who
have grown rich through undeserved prosperity, and from those who have
grown poor in the quest of it, California has suffered sorely. Even now,
far and wide, people think of California as a region where wealth is not
dependent on thrift, where one can somehow "strike it rich" without that
tedious attention to details and expenses which wears out life in effete
regions such as Europe and the Eastern states. In this feeling there is
just enough of truth to keep the notion alive, but never enough to save
from disaster those who make it a working hypothesis. The hope of great
or sudden wealth has been the mainspring of enterprise in California,
but it has also been the excuse for shiftlessness and recklessness, the
cause of social disintegration and moral decay. The "Argonauts of '49"
were a strong, self-reliant, generous body of men. They came for gold,
and gold in abundance. Most of them found it, and some of them retained
it. Following them came a miscellaneous array of parasites and
plunderers; gamblers, dive-keepers and saloon-keepers, who fed fat on
the spoils of the Argonauts. Every Roaring Camp had its Jack Hamlin as
well as its Flynn of Virginia, John Oakhurst came with Yuba Bill, and
the wild, strong, generous, reckless aggregate cared little for thrift,
and wasted more than they earned.
But it is not gold alone that in California has dazzled men with visions
of sudden wealth. Orange groves, peach orchards, prune orchards, wheat
raising, lumbering, horse-farms; chicken-ranches, bee-ranches,
sheep-breeding, seal-poaching, cod-fishing, salmon-canning - each of
these has held out the same glittering possibility. Even the humblest
ventures have caught the prevailing tone of speculation. Industry and
trade have been followed, not for a living, but for sudden wealth, and
often on a scale of personal expenses out of all proportion to the
probable results. In the sixties, when the gold-fever began to subside,
it was found that the despised "cow counties" would bear marvelous crops
of wheat. At once wheat-raising was undertaken on a grand scale. Farms
of five thousand to fifty thousand acres were established on the old
Spanish grants in the valleys of the Coast Range and in the interior,
and for a time wheat-raising on a grand scale took its place along with
the more conventional forms of gambling, with the disadvantage that
small holders were excluded, and the region occupied was not filled up
by homes.
The working out of most of the placer mines and the advent of
quartz-crushing with elaborate machinery have changed gold-mining from
speculation to regular business, to the great advantage of the state.
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