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He never accosted anybody, never even complained when a godless brace of soldier roughs robbed him of his bottle as he lay half-dozing to the lullaby of the babbling stream. He simply meandered a mile and got another. From this plane of inoffensive obscurity Case had sprung in one night to fame and, almost, to fortune.
They bought fewer goods in San Francisco, and the storekeepers found business falling off. Too many houses had been built, so rents went down and times were hard for a year or two. In '55 there were many bank failures, and business troubles of all kinds made the people restless, and roughs and murderers carried a strong hand.
As they controlled the press, they wrote their own history, and the world generally gives them the credit of having purged San Francisco of rowdies and roughs; but their success has given great stimulus to a dangerous principle, that would at any time justify the mob in seizing all the power of government; and who is to say that the Vigilance Committee may not be composed of the worst, instead of the best, elements of a community?
W.A. Ingham, said: 'Here am I; the Lord's will be done. "On the third day of the street work, the whisky and beer interest seemed to have awakened to a full consciousness of the situation. Drinkers, dealers and roughs gathered in large numbers on the street to wait for the praying women.
All the roughs of the town were at his disposal, and when these did not yield material enough recourse was had to beat of drum, that instrument, together with the man who thumped it, being either hired at half-a-crown a day or "loaned" from the nearest barracks. Selected members of the crowd thus assembled were then plied with drink "to invite them to enter" an invitation they seldom refused.
And not as the Barbarians and Philistines, whose honesty and whose sense of humour make them shrink, as we have seen, from treating the State as too serious a thing, and from giving it too much power; for indeed the only State they know of, and think they administer, is the expression of their ordinary self; and though the headstrong and violent extreme among them might gladly arm this with full authority, yet their virtuous mean is, as we have said, pricked in conscience at doing this, and so our Barbarian Secretaries of State let the Park railings be broken down, and our Philistine Alderman-Colonels let the London roughs rob and beat the bystanders.
I saw their pale, wicked, snarling faces in the glow of the lantern. A little later a great shindy broke out in the darkness, and I heard voices calling loudly for a rally in the name of some guild or society. I moved closer, but I could make out little save that it was a very pretty fight in which a company of good citizens were trying to put to flight a band of roughs and law-breakers.
But these cotillons were unnecessarily boisterous, on account of the roughs, who, looked upon as outsiders by the better-behaved portion of the throng, got up a wild war-step of their own on the skirts of the legitimate dance, dishonestly appropriating to their coarse movements the music intended for it alone, as they stamped and shouted, and wheeled round with a ludicrous affectation of grace, in the space between the dancers and the bulkheads of the deck.
And as the wine flows, the more urbane becomes the merriment until there falls upon all that pleasant sleepiness which sake brings, and the guests, one by one, smilingly depart. Nothing could be happier or gentler than their evening's joviality yet sailors are considered in Japan an especially rough class. What would be thought of our own roughs in such a country?
In the crowd of roughs though goodness knows there is little cause for merriment, so far as one can see there is a quite different, deeper, and more universal feeling of bluff cheeriness, not put on, but unconscious, as though, in spite of present misery, things were going right for them somehow.
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