Absorbed in their own pursuits, confident that a short time would enable them to realize their great object of making a fortune and then leaving the country, the better portion of the community abandoned the control of public affairs to whoever might be willing or desirous to assume it. Of course there was no lack of men who had no earthly objection to assume all public duties and fill all public offices. Politicians void of honesty and well-skilled in all the arts of intrigue, whose great end and aim in life was to live out of the public treasury and grow rich by public plunder, and whose most blissful occupation was to talk politics in pot houses and groggeries; men of desperate fortunes who sought to mend them, not by honest labor, but by opportunities for official pickings and stealings; bands of miscreants resembling foul and unclean birds which clamor and fight for the chance of settling down upon and devouring the body to which their keen scent hag directed them; all were astir and with but little effort obtained all that they desired. The offices were thus filled by rapacious and unscrupulous men. The agents who had helped to elect them, or impose them upon the people by fraud, were supported and protected in their villainies; and in the consciousness of impunity for crime, walked the streets heavily armed and ready on the instant to exact a bloody revenge for an interference with their infamous schemes, or an attempt to bring them to merited punishment. In San Francisco the effects of all this were visible at an early period in the prevalence of crime and outrage; in the laxity with which offenders were prosecuted; in the squandering of public property; the increasing burden of taxation; and the insecurity of life and property. Now and then when the evils of the system weighed with the most depressing effect upon the business part of the community, some spasmodic effort for a time produced a change. But a temporary check only was applied. The snake was scotched, not killed. The ballot box upon whose sanctity, in a Republican government must the liberties of the people depend, was in the hands of the pliant tools of designing politicians, or of desperate knaves ready to bargain and sell the result of the election to the party or individuals who would pay the largest sum for it. By such infamous arts had many officials of law and justice been placed in situations of trust and power. Could it reasonably be expected that they would honestly and fairly apply the law to the punishment of the friends who had given them their offices, when they added to these crimes against society, the scarcely more flagrant ones of robbery and murder? If it was possible, the people did not believe it would be done. They saw enough to convince them that it was not done. They saw an unarmed man shot down and instantly killed in one of the most frequented streets of the city while endeavoring to escape from his pursuer.