were surely there. Peru and Mexico were nothing to these. Only find
them, and 'get-rich-quick' would be the order of the day for every true
adventurer. These mountains moved about in men's imaginations and on
prospectors' maps, always ahead of the latest pioneer, somewhere behind
the Back of Beyond. They and their glamour died hard. Even that staid
geographer of a later day, Thos. Jeffreys, added to his standard atlas
of America, in 1760, this item of information on the Far Northwest:
_Hereabouts are supposed to be the Mountains of Bright Stones mentioned
in the Map of ye Indian Ochagach._

Speculation of the wildcat kind was bad. But it was the seamy side of a
praiseworthy spirit of enterprise. Monopoly seems worse than
speculation. And so, in many ways, it was. But we must judge it by the
custom of its age. It was often unjust and generally obstructive. But it
did what neither the national government nor joint-stock companies had
yet learnt to do. Monopoly went by court favor, and its rights were
often scandalously let and sometimes sublet as well. But, on the whole,
the Queen, the court, and the country really meant business, and
monopolists had either to deliver the goods or get out. Monopolists sold
dispensations from unworkable laws, which was sometimes a good thing and
sometimes a bad. They sold licenses for indulgence in forbidden
pleasures, not often harmless. They thought out and collected all kinds
of indirect taxation and had to face all the troubles that confront the
framers of a tariff policy to-day. Most of all, however, in a
rough-and-ready way they set a sort of Civil Service going. They served
as Boards of Trade, Departments of the Interior, Customs, Inland
Revenue, and so forth. What Crown and Parliament either could not or
would not do was farmed out to monopolists. Like speculation the system
worked both ways, and frequently for evil. But, like the British
constitution, though on a lower plane, it worked.