The rains

placed by the woodpeckers. coming from the south had soaked and spoiled the acorns on that side of the trees, but on the north side the acorns were dry and sound, though presumably many of them were several years old. They were dry, hard, and bitter, but the sauce of hunger made them welcome. Having observed the Indians eat a kind of pepper grass, we tried it and found it good, and a pleasant variation from the bitter acorns.

In the afternoon Davis and I found rich diggings. We came to a gully so steep that the bedrock was bare in places, and there in the clear water we could see the particles of gold, some weighing as much as a quarter of an ounce. In half an hour each had picked up on the point of his knife $45 worthnearly three ounces. We went down the gully to where it was not so steep, and from a pan of surface dust washed out five dollars. We tried several other places and found as much. We came to the conclusion that we could make $500 a day in these gullies with a rocker. We went to several other gullies and found prospects nearly as good, and that without going down to the bedrock-for we did not feel strong enough on our scanty diet to do any hard work.

Tuttle and Batchelder, another pair of the prospectors, had also found good diggings in several large gullies, though like us they did not go down to the bedrock. They had, however, a much larger piece of the metal to show; it weighed an ounce, and it was in a shovelful of the top dirt which they threw away. A metallic ring struck their ears and a little search led to the finding of this piece, as long and wide as the bowl of a soup spoon, and in one place a quarter of an inch thick. Tuttle was confident he could wash $500 a day in his ravine, and Davis promised as much in ours; and more than $60 were shown as vouchers by the prospectors, who said there was an abundance of pay dirt but they had not anywhere gone through it to the bedrock.

Hungry as we were our party was very jovial that evening. We supposed that we were each sure of several hundred thousand dollars. The general estimate was $500,000. We discussed the methods of transporting our treasure to the East and the uses we would make of it. Occasionally one would go off to a pine tree and pick out some acorns. Andrews said that only one thing was needed to make his happiness perfect, and that was a good dinner of pork and beans. Some merriment was caused by recalling the fact that when at the Middle Bar he had been in the habit of saying that he would be perfectly happy if he could have a supper of ham and eggs and a dance with a Kentucky girl. When he had nothing better than acorns he thought pork and beans good enough for the highest enjoyment; but when he had an abundance of pork and beans, then he longed for ham and eggs. There was a sliding arrangement to his scale of felicity.

We made fun of our situation. When we found wormy acorns we offered them to our neighbors. We wondered whether Nebuchadnezzar's pasture was more palatable than ours. We agreed to gather the pepper grass seed when it ripened and send it to our Eastern relatives for the purpose of giving them a chance to go to grass.

Instead of starting for home the next morning we continued our journey another day, but when we met in the evening the hunters had killed no game and the prospectors had found no gold. We had to fall back on our acorns and grass. The Indians, who had come to see us every day and had furnished several men to accompany each pair of our hunters, seeing that we had nothing to eat, brought us a loaf of acorn bread and a basket of buckeye soup, both tasteless and full of sand, and to me less palatable than the raw acorns. We received their gifts with the show of gratitude due to their kindness.

We were all anxious to get back the next

day to Clear Creek, so we started at daylight, and all reached the Middle Bar that evening, save one who arrived the next morning. For three days we had nothing to eat save acorns and grass, with a taste of acorn bread and buckeye soup. I prefer a square meal.

My

Then began the preparations for moving to Cottonwood, now known as Arbuckle, where we arrived several weeks later, followed by some hundreds of Oregonians, who had heard at the Lower Springs of our rich diggings and wanted to share them. Our party, consistingof twelve prospectors and their respective partners, twenty-four in all, took up as claims the gullies that we had prospected, leaving the remainder of the country to the Oregonians. We decided to work our claims as a joint stock company, but we stuck together only one week. partner and I took out $500 the first day, the next day $300, the third day $150, and decreasing sums on the following days. When we divided our joint stock gold there was little more than a tin cup full-not a pint cup--for each man. When afterwards we worked together in couples, on separate account, the results were even less satisfactory. It seemed that in prospecting, we had not only struck the richest spots, but spots which were richer in the top dirt than on the bedrock. February and March brought little rain; many of the gullies went dry soon after we reached our diggings; the Oregonians went back to the Lower Springs, after making war on the Indians, whom we could not afterwards conciliate; and before April we had returned to the Middle Bar, not only without the $500,000 each, but poorer than if we had never undertaken our prospecting expedition.

On the first of May I abandoned the business of gold washing, and came to San Francisco. My share in a day's labor in the mines never exceeded $50, except during the first week on the Cottonwood diggings, and often it was not more than $10.

After deducting expenses, the year had added nothing to my capital in money, though it had added something in experience.

I remained for years in California before I felt any special attachment for the State. Business led me to study its resources as compared with those of other regions, and the wider my comparison, the stronger grew the conviction that as a chosen home for young men of enterprise, the world offers nothing better than California.

In seeking a new country, what should the emigrant ask? First, a high grade of popular intelligence, which implies mental development for himself and education for his children. Second, good resources for commerce, agriculture, and other branches of industry. Third, its territory should be vacant. A large semi-barbarous population, unable or unwilling to learn the higher arts of civilization, as in portions of Asia or Africa, is one of the greatest obstacles to progress. Fourth, though accessible without great danger or privation, it should not be within easy reach of the hordes of beggars and vagrants in densely populated regions. Just as the difficulty and expense of reaching the United States from Europe, and California from the Atlantic States have diminished, in the same proportion have declined the average intelligence and character of the immigrants. Fifth, the new country should have a cool, equable climate, acting as a continual spur to the mental and physical energies. If mere animal comfort was the main object of life, the climatic requirement would be the first of all in importance. Sixth and last, perhaps, as a natural accompaniment of the other conditions, the government should efficiently protect. the people in the enjoyment of their equal rights. If thirty-eight years ago we had looked through the wide world for a country possessing, or likely to possess these requirements within a few years, where could we have found them in the most felicitous combination?

It

But let

Your reply, like mine, is California. was fortunate for us pioneers that such a land was open and within our reach when we were about to start on the serious business of life, and it was fortunate for California that she attracted such men as were a large proportion of the pioneers. me not be understood as claiming perfection or exemption from criticism for either them or their adopted State. Much might be better here than it is; much remains to be improved by the generation of young men now among us and their successors. Much has been done in the past, but there is no end to the work that remains for the future to do.

When Æneas, at the request of Dido, as we are told in Virgil's great epic, recounted the circumstances under which he had arrived in Carthage, the revival of his reminiscences filled him with unspeakable sorrow; it was like tearing open a deep and dangerous wound that had partly healed over. The conquest and destruction of Troy, the slaughter and enslavement of nearly all his relatives and fellow citizens, his compulsory flight from his native country and the severing of all his early associations, consecrated by the religion of his ancestors and by the favor of their mythical gods-such were the thoughts that pressed upon him when he explained how he came to be a wanderer in the western Mediterra

nean.

Not with such feelings does the pioneer of California recount the story of his travels to a new land on the verge of the sunset. As he looks back over his adventure and its motives, his predominant feelings are

pleasure and pride. He finds satisfaction in contemplating the unexampled activity, with its constant round of excitement, in the commercial and other industrial phases of Californian life during the last thirty-eight years; and as he recalls the marvelous changes that he has witnessed and the scenes through which he has passedscenes so different from those of the ordinary experience-he is sometimes tempted. to wonder whether the records of his memory are not the fictions of a wild, though happy imagination. If he is not a millionaire, he has had a fair chance to be one, and perhaps has been one repeatedly in near anticipation. He has had all the fun of prolonged pursuit without the disenchantment of possession, and he can console himself with the reflection that if he and all his fellow pioneers had become millionaires, California would not have been large enough to hold them. He has remained within the limits of his Own country, or if a foreigner by birth, he came to a land which gave him a cordial welcome and treated him as if he were one of her native sons. He has contributed to enrich the State and to solidify and glorify the Union. He has seen the influence of his enterprise acting as a beneficent stimulus throughout the civilized world. He knows that of all the long land migrations of large bodies of men recorded in history since the earliest ages, none was more peaceful in the purposes and effects, none more satisfactory to its participants, and none more beneficial within a life time to a large portion of mankind than the march of the gold hunters to California in 1849.

John S. Hittell.

It has often been proposed that the members of the President's Cabinet should have seats in Congress, and the proposition is at present in the somewhat practical shape of a bill before the House of Representatives. The ideas which most people have on the subject are very vague, and this is particularly apparent in an able article entitled "Ministerial Responsibility and the Constitution," by Mr. Abbott Lawrence Lowell, in the Atlantic Monthly for February, 1886. The article proves very conclusively that a responsible ministry, by making Congress all powerful, would utterly subvert the theory of divided power which is the essence of. our form of government; and in this respect I entirely agree with it. But I cannot agree with its assumption that we propose to establish in this country a responsible ministry. I am not aware that anything of the sort is intended. Mr. Lowell says, "For this country the same system of a responsible ministry is recommended as a panacea for all our ills;" and his whole article seems to be aimed at the movement now on foot to give Cabinet officers seats in Congress without the right to vote, so that they may more easily furnish intelligent information to that body on subjects connected with their departments. Now a responsible ministry and the present attempt to give members of the Cabinet seats in Congress, are two very different things. The assumption that they are the same thing is calculated to injure a good cause and I think deserves some discussion.

By responsible ministry is meant the government of a country by a committee of the legislature, and the best example of it is to be found in England. In that country Parliament wields all the sovereign power, and the executive department is subservient to it and is carried on by certain members of Parliament called a ministry, who hold office VOL IX.-14.

only so long as they have a majority in the legislature and can receive support for their measures and policy.

The American form of government is radically different. In England the people have given all the sovereign power they possess to Parliament, and that body is the government, or, as the law books say, is omnipotent. In America the people have given only a part of their sovereign power to the government, and have reserved the rest for themselves and for their State governments. They expressed this in the Constitution by saying: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively or to the people."

Moreover, the portion of power they allowed the government they did not give to one department of it, but divided among three departments, legislative, executive and judicial, and with the intent that these divisions should act as a check on each other and prevent the government from encroaching on the rights of the States or of the people. The legislature can pass laws but cannot execute them nor decide cases under them, and cannot in any way exceed the powers granted in the written Constitution. The executive executes the laws and holds his office for a period of four years independently of the will of the legislature. The judiciary construes the laws in the cases brought before it, and in this respect is independent of the will of either the legislature or the executive.

In England the arrangement is totally different. Parliament alone decides what is constitutional, without consulting or being bound by a written instrument, and changes the executive department at pleasure.

If ministerial responsibility were introduced into America, that is to say if Cab

inet officers lost their positions so soon as a majority of Congress disapproved of them, it would revolutionize our government and destroy the balance of the divided power. If the Cabinet had to defend their policy on the floor of Congress and lost their places if they failed, the executive would cease to be an independent department. Congress would have absorbed it. It is true the President is distinct from the Cabinet and performs his constitutional duties of veto, pardon, command of army and navy, and execution of the laws independently of the heads of departments. They cannot control him except by advice, and he exercises great control over them. But still if they went in and out of office at the pleasure of Congress, it is easy to see how the President's power would be injured and his efficiency in executing the laws seriously impaired. He would soon become a weak creature, obliged to appoint to Cabinet positions the leaders of the dominant party in Congress. If he were a Republican and Congress Democratic, he would have to take into his confidence his bitterest enemies. He would become the servant of Congress, of no greater dignity and force than the sheriff of a county, and his election by the people as an independent power in the government would be a farce.

A responsible ministry means the fusion of legislature and executive. This is directly opposed to the American Constitution and would require an amendment according to the formalities of the Fifth Article to put it in practice. But besides being unconstitutional it is not desirable. It has worked very well for the last fifty years in England, where conservative customs and a carefully guarded elective franchise hold the legislature in check. But it is as yet unsettled whether the English system could be worked, even on English soil, with universal suffrage. In this country it would be disasThe power of all others which we dread is the untrammelled will of a legislaOur legislatures, State and national,

trous.

ture.

And

create apprehension whenever they meet, and their adjournment is welcomed with a sigh of relief. As Mr. Horace Davis has clearly shown in his excellent little pamphlet on American Constitutions, nearly every State in the Union has been laboring for years to cut down the power of its legislature and increase the power of its governor. Mr. Lowell shows that if Congress absorbed the executive department the Supreme Court would soon be of little account, and the rights of the States would be invaded. At every session we should be swamped in a mass of crude legislation which, would depress our enterprise and trade more than a war and pestilence combined.

But the plan to give Cabinet officers seats in Congress, without the right to vote, and not under penalty of losing their offices for failure to carry a measure, avoids all the evils of a responsible ministry and has some of its advantages. Let the bill now before Congress speak for itself.

"Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress asssembled, That the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Navy, the Secretary of the Interior, the Attorney-General, and the Postmaster General shall be entitled to occupy seats on the floor of the House of Representatives, with the right to participate in debate on matters relating to the business of their respective departments, under such rules as may be prescribed by the House."

This bill was introduced last year by Mr. Long of Massachusetts, and was referred to the Committee on Reform in the Civil Service, where it now lies. It is to be observed that it says the cabinet officers" shall be entitled to occupy seats" and so on. That is to say, the privilege of attendance is offered, but there is no legal compulsion to secure it. Moral compulsion, will, however, be sufficient. An officer who will not come on the floor and give information and answer questions when asked, will be very likely to find his public career a short one. Indeed there is no use at all in making attendance compulsory, for the only remedy in case of re