There were practically no manufactures on the whole coast.  The inhabitants depended for all luxuries and necessities on foreign trade, and in exchange gave hide and tallow from the semi-wild cattle that roamed the hills.  Even this trade was discouraged by heavy import duties which amounted at times to one hundred per cent of the value.  Such conditions naturally led to extensive smuggling which was connived at by most officials, high and low, and even by the monks of the missions themselves.

Although the chief reason for Spanish occupancy was to hold the country, the provisions for defense were not only inadequate but careless.  Thomes says, in Land and Sea, that the fort at Monterey was “armed with four long brass nine-pounders, the handsomest guns that I ever saw all covered with scroll work and figures.  They were mounted on ruined and decayed carriages.  Two of them were pointed toward the planet Venus, and the other two were depressed so that had they been loaded or fired the balls would have startled the people on the other side of the hemisphere.”  This condition was typical of those throughout the so-called armed forts of California.

The picture thus presented is unjustly shaded, of course, for Spanish California had its ideal, noble, and romantic side.  In a final estimate no one could say where the balance would be struck; but our purpose is not to strike a final balance.  We are here endeavoring to analyze the reasons why the task of the American conquerors was so easy, and to explain the facility with which the original population was thrust aside.

It is a sometimes rather annoying anomaly of human nature that the races and individuals about whom are woven the most indestructible mantles of romance are generally those who, from the standpoint of economic stability or solid moral quality, are the most variable.  We staid and sober citizens are inclined to throw an aura of picturesqueness about such creatures as the Stuarts, the dissipated Virginian cavaliers, the happy-go-lucky barren artists of the Latin Quarter, the fiery touchiness of that so-called chivalry which was one of the least important features of Southern life, and so on.  We staid and sober citizens generally object strenuously to living in actual contact with the unpunctuality, unreliability, unreasonableness, shiftlessness, and general irresponsibility that are the invariable concomitants of this picturesqueness.  At a safe distance we prove less critical.  We even go so far as to regard this unfamiliar life as a mental anodyne or antidote to the rigid responsibility of our own everyday existence.  We use these historical accounts for moral relaxation, much as some financiers or statisticians are said to read cheap detective stories for complete mental relaxation.