The woman, an hour or two after she committed the murder, was formally tried by a jury of twelve, found guilty, and condemned to be hung that afternoon. The case was so clear that it admitted of no doubt, several men having been witnesses of the whole occurrence; and the woman was hung accordingly, on the bridge in front of the town, in presence of many thousand people. For those whose ideas of the proper mode of administering criminal law are only acquired from an acquaintance with the statistics of crime and its punishment in such countries as England, where a single murder excites horror throughout the kingdom, and is for days a matter of public interest, where judicial corruption is unknown, where the instruments of the law are ubiquitous, and its action all but infallible,--for such persons it may be difficult to realize a state of things which should render it necessary, or even excusable, that any number of irresponsible individuals should exercise a power of life and death over their fellow men. And no doubt many sound theories may be brought forward against the propriety of administering Lynch law; but California, in the state of society which then existed, and in view of the total inefficiency, or worse than inefficiency, of the established courts of justice, was no place for theorizing upon abstract principles. Society had to protect itself by the most practical and unsophisticated system of retributive justice, quick in its action, and whose operation, being totally divested of all mystery and unnecessary ceremony, was perfectly comprehensible to the meanest understanding--a system inconsistent with public safety in old countries--unnecessary, in fact, where the machinery of the law is perfect in all its parts--but at the same time one which men most naturally adopt in the absence of all other protection; and any one who lived in the mines of California at that time is bound gratefully to acknowledge that the feeling of security of life and person which he there enjoyed was due in a great measure to his knowledge of the fact that this admirable institution of Lynch law was in full and active operation.