HISTORY OF AGRICULTURE 73 



California was as empty of law as it was of popu- 

 lation when the Americans came. There were only 

 a few old Mexican regulations framed for a pastoral 

 people dwelling in a country where land was too 

 abundant to be of much value, where credit was 

 practically unknown and in which there were no 

 judges, courts nor lawyers, except as local justices 

 of the peace (alcaldes) dispensed justice in personal 

 relations. It is conclusive testimony to the quality 

 of the American pioneers and their insight as well as 

 their devotion to the principles of morality and 

 equity, that the rules and regulations which they 

 adopted and enforced for self-government in their 

 mining camps, and by which they established justice 

 in a new country without laws and adjusted right 

 and title to land and water in mining, were subse- 

 quently largely embodied in the statutes of the State 

 and of the nation. Nor is it less demonstrative of 

 the earnest desire of these pioneers for equal justice 

 that they inscribed in the constitution of the new 

 State the practice of their Spanish predecessors that 

 a wife does not part with her right to possess and to 

 bequeath her individual property and that she has 

 equal title with her husband to whatever community 

 property accumulates during a period of marriage. 

 Although there are property rights of women still 

 to be secured, this conception of their equality, which 

 entered at the very beginning into the organic and 

 statute law of California, doubtless exerted a strong 

 influence toward the attainment of full citizenship 

 and suffrage for women, by amendment of the consti- 



