During this time passenger traffic between Australia and San Francisco was greater than it has ever been since--Australians stampeding to California and Californians rushing to Australia. In five months eleven thousand immigrants passed through the principal Australian ports. In the next four years over four hundred thousand immigrants arrived, almost all drawn there by the lure of gold. After the first rush to the diggings had subsided the cities began to fill up again. Supplies for the new mining camps became a commercial factor, and this, together with the handling of the horde of overseas stampeders, caused a big expansion in business. Then when the miners began to take their vacations from the diggings, these Australian cities, formerly quiet sheep towns, experienced their first period of rushing business and wild extravagance. The lucky diggers became the outstanding figures of local society. Their wagerings at the race track or gaming table put former plungers into the shade. They imported the world’s best race-horses, the world’s largest diamonds, and built fine homes. Until that time the wealthy in Australia were almost exclusively the “official” class, aristocrats from England, but with the coming of gold men rose from poverty to wealth almost overnight and the old social lines were thrust aside. The forceful and hard-fisted bosses of the mining camps became the leaders and dominators of commerce, finance and society. As in American get-rich-quick communities, a plague of human parasites began to infest these easy-money centers. Bands of bushrangers sprang into existence and preyed upon the traffic between the goldfields and the cities, but the authorities, if slow, were sure. They stamped out crime with a deadly thoroughness that cowed the rough element. Hold-up--“robbery under arms” it was called--was a crime punishable by death. Australia’s period of lawlessness, in many ways romantic and interesting, was of short duration. The citizens formed no Vigilance Committees. Putting down crime was left to the Mounted Police, and they made a good job of it. * * * * * The returns in the first few months after gold was discovered made a dazzling record. The first dolly set rocking at Golden Point yielded four and one-half pounds of gold in two hours. At Canadian Valley, in the same district, the wash and rubble yielded an average of about thirty-five pounds weight of gold per claim. At Blacksmith’s Hole, on the Canadian River, one party of mates in one day obtained over fifteen hundred dollars per man, the average of the claim being one ounce of gold to every bucket of earth. This claim was worked twice after being abandoned and in all yielded more than one ton in weight of the precious metal.