The numbers of the different classes forming the community were not in the proportion requisite to preserve its equilibrium. Transplanting oneself to California from any part of the world involved an outlay beyond the means of the bulk of the laboring classes; and to those who did come to the country, the mines were of course the great point of attraction; so that in San Francisco the numbers of the laboring and of the working classes generally, were not nearly equal to the demand. The consequence was that laborers’ and mechanics’ wages were ridiculously high; and, as a general thing, the lower the description of labor, or of service, required, the more extravagant in proportion were the wages paid. Sailors’ wages were two and three hundred dollars per month, and there were hundreds of ships lying idle in the bay for want of crews to man them even at these rates. Every ship, on her arrival, was immediately deserted by all hands; for, of all people, sailors were the most unrestrainable in their determination to go to the diggings; and it was there a common saying, of the truth of which I saw myself many examples, that sailors, niggers, and Dutchmen, were the luckiest men in the mines: a very drunken old salt was always particularly lucky. There was a great overplus of young men of education, who had never dreamed of manual labor, and who found that their services in their wonted capacities were not required in such a rough-and-ready, every-man-for-himself sort of place. Hard work, however, was generally better paid than head work, and men employed themselves in any way, quite regardless of preconceived ideas of their own dignity. It was one intense scramble for dollars--the man who got most was the best man--how he got them had nothing to do with it. No occupation was considered at all derogatory, and, in fact, every one was too much occupied with his own affairs to trouble himself in the smallest degree about his neighbor. A man’s actions and conduct were totally unrestrained by the ordinary conventionalities of civilized life, and, so long as he did not interfere with the rights of others, he could follow his own course, for good or for evil, with utmost freedom. Among so many temptations to err, thrust prominently in one’s way, without any social restraint to counteract them, it was not surprising that many men were too weak for such a trial and, to use an expressive, though not very elegant phrase, went to the devil. The community was composed of isolated individuals, each quite regardless of the good opinion of his neighbors; and, the outside pressure of society being removed, men assumed their natural shape, and showed what they really were, following their unchecked impulses and inclinations. The human nature of ordinary life appeared in a bald and naked state, and the natural bad passions of men, with all the vices and depravities of civilization, were indulged with the same freedom which characterizes the life of a wild savage.