January 2011

Many times by the presentation of such an awful theme ( THE ENTERNAL IRREMEDIABLE LOSS OF THE SOUL ), I have brought the young to me with tears and willing docility, and to the question ‘What can we do to be saved?’ my shut-up heart was ready to exclaim ‘Nothing,’…I have been so burdened [as] to take every lawful mode to turn my thoughts to other less exciting themes.”

The eternal irremediable loss of the soul is a iheme whose excitement can scarcely be overestimated, nor was Catharine Esther Beecher, the author of the somewhat disheveled paragraph quoted above, one to do so.

“If the fear of the Lord,” Catharine continues, “is the beginning of wisdom, I certainly began aright.” Catharine’s case was not an unusual one for her time and place: she was a nineteenth-century Connecticut Congregationalist.

Strangers to Washington, particularly Englishmen who are used to the House of Commons, are surprised and disappointed, in modern times, by an actual view of Congress in session—the usually deserted chambers, the inattention to the speeches, the rare appearances m their chairs of the so-called Presiding Officers, the abysmal level of the oratory, the manner and even the dress of the members. It has a drabness reflected in the dull pages of the Congressional Record , most of whose “speeches” were never spoken but merely printed as part of the endless popularity contest of modern American politics. Members base their votes on questionnaires; they bend with every wind; fence-building among any minority or pressure group is the order of this soft-minded day. It is a generation at least since intelligent people have seen a battle of true principle, heard a great speech or even a great witticism in our legislative halls.

“We entered the Eldorado House and such a scene I never beheld…around the sides & center some twenty Gambling tables all in active operation—the room literally thronged, women dealing & betting among the men—a band of some five or six musicians at the far end of the room in full Blast. Licentious pictures hung on the Walls…6 most beautiful chandeliers costing $500 each—a Bar with costly furnishing of massive silver & glass ware and a General excitement with the clash of Glasses—rattling of dice —men of every caste nation & equipment…Imagine then 5 other rooms like this…and you will have the truth…”

— A San Francisco gambling hall described in a traveler’s letter, ca. 1850 .

“I am perfectly enraptured with California.…It is so healthy and such a delightful climate. I have not seen a poor person since I have been here, nor a stingy and penurious one. I never saw such liberality in my life as there is here. The whole country is a perfect picture.”

— From a lady settler’s letter to her family in the East, 1852 .

Henry David Thoreau died a hundred years ago, leaving behind no material possessions worth speaking of. He had lived a short and, by most criteria, an uneventful life. After graduating without great distinction from Harvard, he had worked in desultory fashion at odd jobs around Concord, Massachusetts: as a schoolteacher, woodchopper, and general handyman. He was coolly disinterested in making money, and the credo of hard work for its own sake was lost on him—“It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow,” he once said, “unless he sweats easier than I do.” At his self-built cottage on Walden Pond he proved to his own satisfaction, and to the unending satisfaction of generations of his readers, that life can indeed be simple, beautiful, and—above all—in harmony with nature.

“Of all the cities in the world this is the greatest one, composed of all nations and colers, and the hairiest set of fellows that ever existed…”

— San Francisco described, in a miner’s journal .

“California is surpassingly rich and worthy the efforts of Christians and Philanthropists to bring her people under right influences. You can form no adequate idea of the depth of sin and moral degradation to which most of the people are sunk or rather sink themselves…There are a few however, who have not bowed the knee to Baal.”

— From a missionary’s letter, Mariposa County, January, 1853 .

When we consider how soon some plants which spread rapidly, by seeds or roots, would cover an area equal to the surface of the globe,…how soon some fishes would fill the ocean if all their ova became full-grown fishes, we are tempted to say that every organism, whether animal or vegetable, is contending for the possession of the planet.…Nature opposes to this many obstacles, as climate, myriads of brute and also human foes, and of competitors which may preoccupy the ground. Each suggests an immense and wonderfull greediness and tenacity of life…as if bent on taking entire possession of the globe wherever the climate and soil will permit. And each prevails as much as it does, because of the ample preparations it has made for the contest,—it has secured a myriad chances,—because it never depends on spontaneous generation to save it.

Journal , March 22, 1861

“Seventeen dead bodies were found on one road alone within the last four months and no clue to the perpetrators of this wholesale slaughter has as yet been discovered. California is yet sadly wanting in an effective judicial and constabulary organization…”

— Letter from n former New York siliooltenclicr Io Ins brother, dated Feather River, March, 1852 .