California, then in the full rush of mining, was the touchstone of
Democracy; where, out of the chaos of blackguardism, through lynchings and
vigilance committees, judge and jury were at work evolving decent security
and settled government.

"The wonder is" (he wrote) "not that, in such a State as California
was till lately, the machinery of government should work unevenly, but
that it should work at all. Democracy has never endured so rough a
test as that from which it has triumphantly emerged in the Golden
State and City....

"California is too British to be typically American: it would seem
that nowhere in the United States have we found the true America or
the real American. Except as abstractions, they do not exist; it is
only by looking carefully at each eccentric and irregular America--at
Irish New York, at Puritan New England, at the rowdy South, at the
rough and swaggering Far West, at the cosmopolitan Pacific States--
that we come to reject the anomalous features, and to find America in
the points they possess in common. It is when the country is left that
there rises in the mind an image that soars above all local prejudice
--that of the America of the law-abiding, mighty people who are
imposing English institutions on the world." [Footnote: _Greater
Britain_ (popular edition), p. 193.]

The same thought is summed up in the chapter where he sets down his
recollected impressions on board the ship that carried him southwards
along the shores of America from the Golden Gate towards Panama:

"A man may see American countries, from the pine-wastes of Maine to
the slopes of the Sierra; may talk with American men and women, from