nd constables, were in
league to kill and confiscate; and against these the new agency of the
actual law made war, constituting themselves into an arm of essential
government, and openly called themselves Vigilantes. In turn criminals
used the cloak of the Vigilantes to cover their own deeds of lawlessness
and violence. The Vigilantes purged themselves of the false members, and
carried their own title of opprobrium, the "stranglers," with unconcern
or pride. They grew in numbers, the love of justice their lodestone,
until at one time they numbered more than five thousand in the city of
San Francisco alone, and held that community in a grip of lawlessness,
or law, as you shall choose to term it. They set at defiance the chief
executive of the state, erected an armed castle of their own, seized
upon the arms of the militia, defied the government of the United States
and even the United States army! They were, as you shall choose to call
them, criminals, or great and noble men. Seek as you may to-day, you
will never know the full roster of their names, although they made no
concealment of their identity; and no one, to this day, has ever been
able to determine who took the first step in their organization. They
began their labors in California at a time when there had been more than
two thousand murders--five hundred in one year--and not five legal
executions. Their task included the erection of a fit structure of the
law, and, incidentally, the destruction of a corrupt and unworthy
structure claiming the title of the law. In this strange, swift panorama
there is all the story of the social system, all the picture of the
building of that temple of the law which, as Americans, we now revere,
or, at times, still despise and desecrate.

At first the average gold seeker concerned himself little with law,
because he intended to make his fortune quickly and then hasten back
East to his former home; yet, as early as the winter of 1849, there was
elected a legislature which met at San Jose, a Senate of sixteen members
and an Assembly of thirty-six. In this election the new American vote
was in evidence. The miners had already tired of the semi-military phase
of their government, and had met and adopted a state constitution. The
legislature enacted one hundred and forty new laws in two months, and
abolished all former laws; and then, satisfied with its labors, it left
the enforcement of the laws, in the good old American fashion, to