Handbook To The New Gold-Fields

INTRODUCTION.

HANDBOOK TO THE NEW EL-DORADO.

The problem of colonisation in the north-western portion of British
America is fast working itself out. The same destiny which pushed
forward Anglo-Saxon energy and intelligence into the rich plains of
Mexico, and which has peopled Australia, is now turning the current of
emigration to another of the "waste-places of the earth." The discovery
of extensive goldfields in the extreme west of the territories now
occupied by the Hudson's Bay Company, is a great fact. It no longer
comes to us as the report of interested adventurers, or the exaggeration
of a few sanguine diggers, but with well-authenticated results--large
quantities of gold received at San Francisco, and a consequent rush of
all nations from the gold regions of California, as well as from the
United States and Canada. The _thirst for Gold_ is, as it always has
been, the most attractive, the strongest, the most unappeasable of
appetites--the impulse that builds up, or pulls down empires, and floods
the wilderness with a sudden population. In those wild regions of the
Far West men are pouring in one vast, gold-searching tide of thousands
and tens of thousands, into the comparatively unknown territory beyond
the Rocky Mountains, for which our Legislature has just manufactured a
government. How strange is the comparison instituted by the _Times_
between the rush to Fraser River and the mediaeval crusades, which
carried so large a portion of the population of Europe to die on the
burning plains of Palestine! At Clermont Ferrand, Peter the Hermit has
concluded his discourse; cries are heard in every quarter, "It is the
will of God! It is the will of God!"; Every one assumes the cross, and
the crowd disperses to prepare for conquering under the walls of the
earthly, a sure passage to the heavenly, Jerusalem. What elevation of
motive, what faith, what enthusiasm! Compare with this the picture
presented by San Francisco Harbour. A steamer calculated to carry 600
persons, is laden with 1600. There is hardly standing room on the deck.
It is almost impossible to clear a passage from one part of the vessel
to the other. The passengers are not knights and barons, but tradesmen,
"jobbers," tenants, and workmen of all the known varieties. Their
object in of the earth, earthy--wealth in its rawest and rudest form--
gold, the one thing for which they bear to live, or dare to die.
Although in the comparison the crusades may have the superiority in many
points, yet so little have ideal, romantic, and sentimental
considerations to do with the current of human affairs, that while the
crusades remain a monument of abortive and objectless folly, fatal to
those who embarked in them, and leaving as their chief result a tinge of
Asiatic ferocity on European barbarism, the exodus of San Francisco,
notwithstanding the material end it has in view, is sure to work out the
progress of happiness and civilisation, and add another to the many
conquests over nature, which the present age has witnessed.

In a year more than ordinarily productive of remarkable events, one of
the most noteworthy, and that which is likely to leave a lasting
impression on the world, is this discovery of gold on the coasts of the
Pacific. The importance of the new region as a centre for new
ramifications of English relations with the rest of the world cannot
well be exaggerated either in a political or a commercial point of view.
It will be the first really important point we shall have ever
commanded on that side of the Pacific Ocean, and it cannot but be of
inestimable value in developing our relations with America, China,
Japan, and Eastern Russia.