SALE OF MINERAL LANDS. 444 
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 
afford to mine prudently; the nomad comes here to make his 
“pile” in a few years; he has no wife with 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 hcnest 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 capitalists will buy up the minera 
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 
whole 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 astern states, where capital is king, and where 
there are no laws to prevent the rich men from monopolizing 
