And dies among his worshippers."

And never was there a community or a city where Truth asserted her
sway more potently in the midst of evil than in San Francisco in the
trying days of her youth. With the rush from all lands to California
for the coveted gold came the lawless and the blood-thirsty. Men in
the gambling houses would sometimes quarrel over the results of the
game or over some "love affair." Fair Helen and unprincipled, gay,
thoughtless Paris were here by the Golden Gate. The old story is
constantly repeating itself since the Homeric days. Duels were fought
betimes as a consequence, and the issue for one or both of the
combatants was generally fatal. Gambling in those days was, from a
worldly stand-point, the most profitable business, that is for the
professional player or the saloon-keeper. Indeed it was looked upon
as quite respectable. It has a strange fascination at all times for a
certain class, with whom it becomes a passion as much as love for the
wine-cup, and one must be well grounded in principle to resist its
influences. Many once noble souls who had been tenderly brought up
were led astray. Away from home and its restraining associations,
gambling, drinking, and other sins and vices became their ruin. In
calm moments when alone or under some momentary impulse of goodness
there would rise before them the vision of God-fearing parents--of
open Bibles--of hallowed Sundays; but the thirst for gold could not be
quenched, the mad race must be run, and to the bitter end, dishonour,
death, the grave! Shelley, if he had stood in the midst of the
gamblers, staking all, even their souls, for gold, in those California
days of wild revelry, could not have expressed himself more appositely
than in his graphic and truthful lines, in Queen Mab:

"Commerce has set the mark of selfishness;