Yours of April 12th was received some ten days ago and gave us more pleasure than anything we have recevd since we came to California [392] —Sherman’s arrivals and Lee’s surrender excepted. I immediately ordered a holiday and we went up the mountain and drank success to your enterprise in good Rhine wine. By the next mail I wrote at considerable length to Ashburner urging him to undertake to supply you with a stated and regular series of papers on the Pacific Mining business and other Pacific Commercial topics of national importance. I argued that all the labor of collecting and digesting information would really have its full value to him, professionally—as better fitting him to advise his clients, and that three or four hundred dollars a year he might expect to receive from you—for monthly or semi monthly articles or letters—would be clear gain. He has since returned from a two month’s tour in Colorado and Arizona mining regions and writes me that he will carefully consider what I say and that on the first reading he “guessed” he would do it.

I have been trying to think if there was anything else I could do for you here—but see nothing. If you send me twenty specemin copies I will carefully plant them. But I’ve no idea you will get any subscribers here till you have made yourself a power and a necessity. The leaders of society here are the lawyers—and all the law they generally care for is that of the common local practice. Notes & reviews of legal decisions if very able, might make a paper indispensable to them. Nothing else would. I think you can fasten to several classes, perhaps, in that way, if you are big enough. Ashburner’s letters might possibly force a way for you with the commercial men but it’s not likely. His name had better not appear—or he be suspected of writing for you. He would then be freer.

I sent my annual report yesterday to the Mariposa Co. I hope they will print it, if they do not I intend to do so myself, whenever I leave here. I open at once upon a discussion of the causes of the disappointment which has occurred to the stockholders. Show that it cannot be either from bad engineering or lavish expenditure (I have reduced rates of expense at all points) then state what was expected & the grounds of it. Show that I have thoroughly, judiciously & economically tested these grounds by actual operations and proved beyond all question that the Incorporators were deceived. That every known valuable deposit—(deposit which had been worked with profit at any time) had been worked out before the sale. That appearances & facts stated to the contrary were fallacious—that my success for a time was fallacious—that the best mining experts were deceived; that no possible care or sagacity of examination could have guarded against the deceit—that the primary cause of it is the capricious manner in which gold is distributed in quartz veins—that the same deceit & the same process is occurring constantly all thro the Pacific mining regions, and the swindle is only peculiar from the large extent of the property. Single mines are sold—and corporations founded on single mines are sold—every day. My expenditure in proving the swindle has been small comparatively—more often being spent in proving [393]a single mine than I have spent in proving the worthlessness of twenty.

I have been working hard at this report and the financial and other statements which go with it for some weeks, and though in fair health feel somewhat jaded. I propose to start tomorrow for Yo Semite with Mrs Olmsted and Miss Whitney—for perhaps a fortnight’s cruise. I am in as good health now as when I left New York, and though writing steadily several hours a day for two or three weeks have had very little recurrence of the symptoms which overcame [me] last year. I find that a ride up the mountain every afternoon is all I need—if I can sleep well—to keep me in good condition.

Ashburner wrote me that he thought he could get $5000 San Francisco City Bonds at a price which would leave them sure to pay me 12 prct on investment, and I sent him my draft for $6000 currency on New York, to do it if he could. At the same time I told him that I should prefer to divide it between the City Bonds & Water Works Stock, if as good terms could be had. This is in accordance with what I wrote you of my views. On the chance of being obliged to return to New York I am disposed to take any good opportunity of selling out other stocks and falling back on these two.

I wait in great anxiety to hear more about the paper—your note being aggravatingly concise & suggestive.

I’m thinking it will make little demonstration of principles, or of party sympathies, but will advocate certain measures & tendencies, federal & civilizing.

I have thought since I had been here—while I have appreciated the eventual danger of rebellion or of rebellious acts—that the federal govt & the East or civilized communities in the federal government ought to have a more decided control of affairs in the wilderness. It is a very difficult question, and I am not prepared to say that government should not allow emigration to go into a territory or district, till it is able & prepared to sustain the fundamental laws of civilization therein—but I do think more care should be taken in this respect. I have been thinking whether it would be constitutional & American & practicable for the Central government to interfere actively to prevent outrageously unjust & wicked state legislation, such as that which in Califna virtually makes all Chinese, Indians & Negroes outlaws, & legal victims of the basest of white men, and especially whether the State Courts might not be under some surveillance of the Federal Courts—whether it might not be made the duty of some federal judicial officer to overlook State Courts and have the responsible persons punished, when they neglect their duty—when they are grossly unjust and oppressive & cruel in their action. With [394]an elective judiciary in new communities, there is much done that is outrageously wrong.

But that is our system. We educate men gradually by throwing them on the resources from the brutal condition of the pioneers to that of steady-going citizens with fixed property & all the conservative virtues that go with it. It is a very expensive system, but perhaps no other is effective, or more economical in the long run. It is wonderful with how little law & government, a moderate degree of safety to life & property, can be had. I suppose that hardly a day passes, however, in this County, without a robbery—and not often a week without a murder or murderous assault—generally amounting to highway robbery. Not one case in a hundred of this kind is noticed by officers of the law or troubles a court—most of the sufferers being Chinese. These degraded races are a terrible trial to republicanism—& a terrible educational curse to our people.

I was turning over an old “Littell” today, which contains several articles from the Saturday Review, and it struck me that the chief excellence of the Satrdy Review consisted in its getting cultivated men to discuss questions & talk of matters which are not easy or pleasant to write on, but in which everybody has a commonplace interest. So it was with the Rambler and Guardian & Spectator, which I every now and then read a little in with pleasure, though all the illustrations & localization is so old and out of date & comparatively uninteresting. And I think the most difficult thing for an editor to do is to get people of high cultivation to write on topics which do not at once appeal to the immediate interests or excite the imagination of writers. And I think a great foundation of success would be had if an editor or manager of a periodical, could by any means secure a few men or one man of real good sense, and fair writing ability & scholarship & information, who would be under the ordinary obligation of an employee—of a clerk or lieutenant, or servant, to his superior, to write as well as he could to order, on any topic or to follow out any suggestion. You will yourself—or any man under no constraint—will surely avoid topics, which require tough thinking & which do not appeal pleasantly to your imagination—which you don’t feel like writing upon. But the mere fact that you are a professional writer & associate with cultivated men and are always rather crowded with a certain range of topics of immediate interest, will prevent you from having a similar literary appetite to that of most readers. People in business, farmers &c. & country lawyers, doctors & parsons, get the “topics of the day,” as a matter of course. But cultivated thought, on more commonplace topics, not necessarily of immediate interest, they do not. Hence the appetite for novels & poems. Your paper needs to be, peculiarly, a substitute to thousands of men situated as I am, as my lawyer twelve miles away is, as numerous clergymen are, for a cultivated companion—for cultivated society—for drawing out their own more cultivated powers of [395]reflection—dying of torpor for want of something to draw them out.—We—such people—want bread as well as beef and wine. And I find that I read cultivated talk on such topics as self-esteem, gentility, good breeding, sea fareing, dress, fashion &c, with no particular point or purpose, but with illustrations which relate the thoughts & reflections (however trite to a student) to our own time, to steamboats & rail ways and crinoline and india-rubber and lager bier &c, &c, with great appetite. Do recollect that except at a very few points there is no cultivated society in America, but a great many intelligent men & women, to whom a newspaper may well be the only substitute for whatever, in a society more elaborately civilized, keeps a man’s common-place cultivation alive.