The Age of Gold by H. W. Brands

Author:H. W. Brands [Brands, H. W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48122-1
Published: 2008-12-09T16:00:00+00:00

A PRECEDENT IT WAS, but hardly a solution. The decline of the Hounds simply made room for other thugs, including a gang of Australians known as the Sydney Ducks, or Sydney Coves, who by 1850 had a reputation worse than the Hounds’. To some extent the Australians’ evil name owed to their country’s history as the outdoor prison for British felons, but to some extent it was honestly—which was to say, dishonestly—earned in California. Frank Soulé explained the Australians’ preeminence in crime:

The voyage from Sydney to San Francisco was neither a very tedious nor an expensive one; and great numbers of “ticket-of-leave” men and old convicts who had “served their time,” early contrived to sail for California. There the field seemed so rich and safe for a resumption of their quondam pranks that they yielded to the temptation, and forthwith began to execute villainies that in magnitude and violent character far exceeded those for which they had been originally convicted. Callous in conscience, they feared nothing save the gallows.

But that they had little reason to dread in merciful, gentle, careless California, where prosecutors and witnesses were few, or too busy to attend to the calls of justice; where jurors, not knowing the law, and eager to be at money-making again, were apt to take hasty charges from the bench as their sole rule of conduct; where judges, chosen by popular election, were either grossly ignorant of law, or too timid or careless, corrupt or incapable, to measure out the full punishment of crime; and where the laws themselves had not yet been methodically laid down, and the forms and procedure of legal tribunals digested into a plain, unerring system.

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