2 34 Life and Sport on the Pacific Slope 



later I returned to California. The land had been 

 sold to a friend of mine. And he had resold it, 

 during those few months, for thirty dollars an 

 acre! 



To show how curiously the moral currency — to 

 borrow Frederic Harrison's fine phrase — may be 

 debased in a country subject to an amazing infla- 

 tion and deflation of values, I will cite a remark- 

 able case. The town of Santa Cruz sold some 

 bonds in New York. These bonds had been placed 

 in the hands of an agent who, after the sale, bolted 

 with the cash. Thereupon Santa Cruz repudiated 

 the sale. The Supreme Court, however, decided 

 against the town, and made it honest. It is proper 

 to add that this attempted rascality provoked em- 

 phatic condemnation from the State of California. 



Nearly all the public buildings in the West are 

 monuments of bad faith upon the part of the 

 builder, contractor, architect, and those paid offi- 

 cials to whom the care of such important matters 

 is assigned. The new City Hall in San Francisco 

 is a pyramid of fraud incredible : the concrete 

 example of a prodigious "job." 



Speaking of public buildings, it has always seemed 

 to me an incomprehensible blunder upon the part 

 of a people who are shrewd beyond all others in 

 adjusting means to ends that the designing and 

 construction of school-houses, for instance, are en- 

 trusted to Tom, Dick and Harry, instead of to a 

 Board of State Architects, specialists appointed for 

 life, qualified to prepare suitable plans and see them 

 honestly executed. Throughout Southern Califor- 

 nia, where the sun shines steadily for more than 



