SALE OF MINERAL LANDS. 447 



Mono Lake, and Cariboo ; — how could any occupation be other 

 than precarious, managed in such a manner ? Of course min- 

 ing can be made precarious, and these fellows who are always 

 running about are the very ones to make it so. It will not be 

 made more precarious by permanence. If the five thousand 

 miners of El Dorado, and the four thousand miners of Tuo- 

 lumne, will just stay where they are, instead of changing places 

 with each other three times every year, they will not lose any 

 thing on the score of the precariousness of their business. I 

 venture to assert that gold mining in California, conducted 

 prudently, is not an uncertain business at all. A careful man 

 can, with a certainty, earn more than he could as a farmer on 

 the prairies of Illinois, where farming is one of the least pre- 

 carious occupations in the world. The permanent citizen can 

 afibrd to mine prudently ; the nomad comes here to make his 

 " pile " in a few years ; he has no wife vv'ith whom to live joy- 

 ously, and, as a matter of course, his mode of mining is pre- 

 carious. 



But it is said the capitalists will monopolize the mineral 

 lands ; and yet there is not a week that the honest miners do 

 not come to San Francisco to solicit capitalists to invest their 

 capital in mining enterprises ; and when such an investment is 

 made to assist a canal or quartz-mill, all the miners in the vi- 

 cinity are glad, and property rises in value. Why is there 

 more danger of monopoly in mineral lands than in the agricul- 

 tural lands ? Are the former more sacred than the latter ? 

 Is it to be supposed that capitahsts will buy up the mineral 

 lands and then not work them, but let their money lie idle? 

 Certainly not ; capitalists would be in no hurry to invest large- 

 ly at first in the mineral lands : and if they should they would 

 employ large numbers of laborers, to the great benefit of the 

 Avhole country. And the same honest miners who have such 

 an abhorrence of " monopoly," — are not three-fourths of them 

 determined to leave this land of unmonopolized freedom to re- 

 turn to the Eastern states, where capital is king, and where 

 there are no laws to prevent the rich men from monopolizing 



