hough
it occupied a planet all its own. For that world the divine fire of the
law must be re-discovered, evolved, nay, evoked fresh from chaos even as
the savage calls forth fire from the dry and sapless twigs of the
wilderness.

In the gold country all ideas and principles were based upon new
conditions. Precedents did not exist. Man had gone savage again, and it
was the beginning. Yet this savage, willing to live as a savage in a
land which was one vast encampment, was the Anglo-Saxon savage, and
therefore carried with him that chief trait of the American character,
the principle that what a man earns--not what he steals, but what he
earns--is his and his alone. This principle sowed in ground forbidding
and unpromising was the seed of the law out of which has sprung the
growth of a mighty civilization fit to be called an empire of its own.
The growth and development of law under such conditions offered
phenomena not recorded in the history of any other land or time.

In the first place, and even while in transit, men organized for the
purpose of self-protection, and in this necessary act law-abiding and
criminal elements united. After arriving at the scenes of the gold
fields, such organization was forgotten; even the parties that had
banded together in the Eastern states as partners rarely kept together
for a month after reaching the region where luck, hazard and
opportunity, inextricably blended, appealed to each man to act for
himself and with small reference to others. The first organizations of
the mining camps were those of the criminal element. They were presently
met by the organization of the law and order men. Hard upon the miners'
law came the regularly organized legal machinery of the older states,
modified by local conditions, and irretrievably blended with a politics
more corrupt than any known before or since. Men were busy in picking up
raw gold from the earth, and they paid small attention to courts and
government. The law became an unbridled instrument of evil. Judges of
the courts openly confiscated the property of their enemies, or
sentenced them with no reference to the principles of justice, with as
great disregard for life and liberty as was ever known in the
Revolutionary days of France. Against this manner of government
presently arose the organizations of the law-abiding, the
justice-loving, and these took the law into their own stern hands. The
executive officers of the law, the sheriffs a