The variety of habits, manners, tastes, and prejudices, occasioned by the confluence in one spot of almost every variety of the human species, is another bar to a speedy deposit of all these floating and opposite elements into a compact and well assimilated community. “Here,” writes the same gentleman, “we see the character and habits of the English, Irish, Scotch, German, Pole, French, Spaniard, and almost every other nation of Europe. Then you have the South American, the Australian, the Chilian; and finally, the force of this golden mania has dissolved the chain that has hitherto bound China in national solitude, and she has now come forth, like an anchorite from his cell, to join this varied mass of golden speculators. Here we see in miniature just what is done in the large cities of other countries; we have some of our luxuries from the United States and the tropics, butter from Oregon, and for the most part California, Upper or Lower, furnishes us with our beef, &c. The streets are all bustle, as you may imagine, in a place now of nearly thirty thousand inhabitants, independent of a small world of floating population.” Not the smallest wonder, however, presented in this region, is the rapid manner in which social order was shaped out of the human chaos. When a new placer or “gulch” was discovered, the first thing done was to elect officers and extend the area of order. The result was, that in a district five hundred miles long, and inhabited by one hundred thousand people—who had neither government, regular laws, rules, military or civil protection, nor even locks or bolts, and a great part of whom possessed wealth enough to tempt the vicious and depraved,—there was as much security to life and property as in any part of the Union, and as small a proportion of crime. The capacity of a people for self-government was never so triumphantly illustrated. Never, perhaps, was there a community formed of more unpropitious elements; yet from all this seeming chaos grew a harmony beyond what the most sanguine apostle of Progress could have expected. Indeed, there is nothing more remarkable connected with the capital of El Dorado, than the centre point it has become.