Royce On San Francisco

On housing prices: The San Franciscans at this moment, living in their rag palaces, or renting them at figures that would have sounded possible in the Arabian Nights . . . seemed more like madmen than ever. asserted

A correspondent of the New York Post gives with a half-serious fury and contempt an amusing account of the landlords of San Francisco: asserted

A dozen times or more, during the last few weeks, I have been taken by the arm by some of the millionaires — so they call themselves, I call them madmen - of San Francisco, looking wondrously dirty and out at elbows for men of such magnificent pretensions. asserted

They have dragged me about, through the mud and filth almost up to my middle, from one pine box to another, called mansion, hotel, bank, or store, as it may please the imagination, and have told me, with a sincerity that would have done credit to the Bedlamite, that these splendid structures were theirs, and they, the fortunate proprietors, were worth from two to three hundred thousand dollars a year each. uncertain

Their daily and most sober business was at best dangerously near gambling, and their nerves were constantly tormented by unnatural and yet for the time inevitable excitements of a perilously violent sort. asserted

Their life was as a rule comparatively sedentary and they worked far more with their brains than with their hands. asserted

The San Franciscan of property and position . . . had all the mental labor that a man could need, and much more besides, [but] he had little or no true relaxation. uncertain

Able and cultivated business men, who at home would have passed their evenings with their families or in some other pleasant social intercourse, or perchance in lecture rooms or in theaters, here toiled every night until ten or eleven o’clock over their accounts, and began afresh on each new morning, as soon as the light shone over the far-off blue summit of Mount Diablo, the old fierce struggle with the confusions of their business undertakings. asserted

The insane asylum, which the state had very early to equip at Stockton, gave ample proof of the effects of this terrible nervous strain. asserted

Indirectly, however, one sees the same dangers illustrated even in the case of perfectly healthy and normal men, who stood the mental if not the moral strain as well as possible, and liked it. asserted

On the women: There were some women in the city, but they were not exactly respectable persons, yet they were the sole leaders of society. asserted

They too gave it even in later years a certain grace and gaiety that makes one speak of them, with a curious sort of reverence. asserted

Just as one cannot easily remember who the men were that did not gamble in those days, so one fails to recall in looking back on the early years the women who were respectable. asserted

Doubtless such existed; but then they had that curious quality of respectable women — namely, they were somehow not conspicuous, especially in the public crowds. asserted

Everyone has heard how, in San Francisco life, the family ties seemed sometimes almost as weak as the families were rare. asserted

Some men seemed to prize their wives the less because of the very fact that there were in the country so few wives to prize ... asserted

To speak of the matter first from the side of the women concerned themselves, one’s acquaintances could not always be strictly chosen, nor one’s conduct absolutely determined by arbitrary rules. uncertain

One had to adapt oneself to many people, to tolerate, in some people with whom one was thrown, many oddities, and much independence, so long as the essentials of good behavior and good purposes remained. asserted

The difficulty, however, for certain well-meaning but foolish among the younger women who found themselves in the midst of all this new life was to sacrifice some of the nonessentials of social intercourse, as they knew them, without sacrificing anything either of their own personal dignity or of their true delicacy of feeling. asserted

Many such women failed to solve the problem. asserted

Little by little they sacrificed this or that petty prejudice which dignity would have counseled them to observe; and so erelong they were socially more or less distinctly and disastrously careless, both as to behavior and as to companionship. asserted

Men often prized their wives less because the wives grew thus foolishly lighthearted and were, on the whole, less to be prized. asserted

If women fell into these unguarded habits, such as the custom of letting men who chanced to be their friends, and chanced to be lucky, give them, with careless Californian generosity, expensive presents on every occasion when these friends had made some new success in business, and if such “Californian” ways, however innocent in their beginning, led to misunderstandings in the end: still, on the other hand, husbands who found themselves absorbed in business rivalry with a community of irresponsible bachelors, and who accordingly lamented the hostages that they themselves had long since given to fortune, often neglected without reason their families and so in time lost the affection that they had ceased to deserve. asserted

In short, as my mother (who, in the course of a few years, had occasion to hear of or to see a number of these broken California families) judged the too general trouble, it was one that might be said to lie in the lonesomeness of the families of a new land. uncertain

The family grows best in a garden with its kind. asserted

Where family life does not involve healthy friendship with other families, it is apt to be injured by unhealthy if well-meaning friendships with wanderers. asserted

On crime: A merchant named Jansen was assaulted and robbed in his own shop by two men, who came in the evening, pretending to be customers. asserted

The crime, though not the first or the worst of its sort, seemed especially atrocious to the community, which chanced to be in a sensitive mood. asserted

The Alta, usually a very sober and sensible paper, became a trifle overexcited: “How many men shot and stabbed, knocked down and bruised; and who has been punished for it? asserted

Under these circumstances, however, who is to blame? asserted

The Alta, with an amusing unwisdom, proceeds to make the lawyers who defend criminals the first persons responsible for the trouble. asserted

‘We cannot see how any honest man, knowing or having reason to believe another guilty, can ransack heaven and earth for arguments for shielding him from punishment. asserted

Next to the lawyers, the courts and the police are most to blame. asserted

On fraud: There were reasons why the public never learned just how much the energetic Meiggs had stolen. asserted

He never came back, and many people who lost by him felt henceforth a certain delicacy about explaining their relations with him. asserted

For the moment, however, Meiggs was regarded as an exemplary rascal, and men wondered how deep into the business life of San Francisco this sort of corruption had eaten. asserted

If Meiggs, people added, had only been content with cheating his bankers, one could have forgiven him; but, as report insisted, he had cheated his washerwoman. uncertain

That, men declared, was too bad, even for California. asserted

Side by side with these wild memories of a society where every man and woman, without any notable exception, went to the devil on his or her own chosen primrose path, one has to record, as sober fact, taken from one’s newspapers, such things as a very goodly array of churches, supported by active and not poverty-stricken societies. asserted

These societies have also done a large amount of charitable work; they have from the first established benevolent institutions, their exercises are well attended, and their undertakings well supported with money, so that, as one concludes: “We have said enough, we hope, to prove that not all, nor nigh all the citizens of San Francisco, are lost to everything but reckless dissipation. asserted