hubert howe bancroft - Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History ...

LAW WORSE THAN JUDGES. 223
elected judges during the first decade of California
judicial history ? The framers of the constitution in
their honest dependence upon the virtue supposed to
reside in the exercise of the electoral privilege, lost
sight of the peculiar conditions likely to accompany
that franchise in California. But who shall say that,
had the elective power been conferred upon the legislature,
the welfare of the people would have been
more safe than in the hands of the judges elected by
themselves ? for the legislatures were not much above
political conventions.
In the older, agricultural states, settled slowly by
industrious and conscientious men, with parents and
grandparents, brothers and sisters, wives and children,
each in their way influencing legislation, the purity of
the ballot-box, and the honesty of the law-makers
might be depended upon for a generation at least.
But in California, overrun by adventurers from every
land under heaven, with the scum of the great sea of
humanity floating to its shores, until earth, air, and
water shared the contamination, the body politic could
not be healthy, nor its soul pure; least of all should
we look for that highest expression of social integrity
and culture, a perfect judiciary.
Yet we should be justly surprised not to find among
the aspirants to positions of trust, who have secured the
favor of a majority of the electors, some, even many,
who deserved that favor; for even a political convention
may respect the prejudices of the better portion
of society sufficiently to put forward its most respectable
material, intellectually, or otherwise, to be voted
for. And so it fell out, that in the rudest times of
the rude epoch of California history the superior and
supreme judges, with certain marked and most infamous
exceptions, made themselves respected. 1 But
1 None more BO than Orville C. Pratt, a native of Ontario co., N. Y.f
where he was born April 24, 1819. After practising as a lawyer, first at
Rochester, N. Y., and later at Galena, 111., he was appointed associate judge
in Oregon, where he rendered excellent service in the Whitman massacre
cases, and in the famous location controversy of 1851-2. In 1856 he re-