The drunken hunters in their ragged wools, their stained skins, the emigrants in their motley garb—­come this far they knew not why, since men will not admit of Destiny in nations—­also knew not that they were joying over the death of slavery and the life of the Union.  They did not know that now, in a flash, all the old arguments and citations over slavery and secession were ancient and of no avail.  The wagoners of the Sangamon, in Illinois, gathered here, roistering, did not know that they were dancing on the martyr’s grave of Lincoln, or weaving him his crown, or buying shot and shell for him to win his grievous ordeal, brother against brother.  Yet all those things were settled then, beyond that range of the Rockies which senators had said they would not spend a dollar to remove, “were they no more than ten feet high.”

Even then the Rockies fell.  Even then the great trains of the covered wagons, driven by men who never heard of Destiny, achieved their places on the unwritten scroll of Time.

The newcomers from beyond the Sierras, crazed with their easy fortune, and now inflamed yet further by the fumes of alcohol, even magnified the truth, as it then seemed.  They spent their dust by the handful.  They asked for skillets, cooking pans, that they could wash more gold.  They wanted saws, nails, axes, hammers, picks.  They said they would use the wagon boxes for Long Toms.  They said if men would unite in companies to dam and divert the California rivers they would lay bare ledges of broken gold which would need only scooping up.  The miners would pay anything for labor in iron and wood.  They would buy any food and all there was of it at a dollar a pound.  They wanted pack horses to cross the Humboldt Desert loaded.  They would pay any price for men to handle horses for a fast and steady flight.

Because, they said, there was no longer any use in measuring life by the old standards of value.  Wages at four bits a day, a dollar a day, two dollars, the old prices—­why, no man would work for a half hour for such return when any minute he might lift twenty dollars in the hollow of an iron spoon.  Old Greenwood had panned his five hundred in a day.  Men had taken two thousand—­three—­in a week; in a week, men, not in a year!  There could be no wage scale at all.  Labor was a thing gone by.  Wealth, success, ease, luxury was at hand for the taking.  What a man had dreamed for himself he now could have.  He could overleap all the confining limits of his life, and even if weak, witless, ignorant or in despair, throw all that aside in one vast bound into attainment and enjoyment.

Rich?  Why should any man remain poor?  Work?  Why should work be known, save the labor of picking up pure gold—­done, finished, delivered at hand to waiting and weary humanity?  Human cravings could no longer exist.  Human disappointment was a thing no more to be known.  In California, just yonder, was gold, gold, gold!  Do you mind—­can you think of it, men?  Gold, gold, gold!  The sun had arisen at last on the millennial day!  Now might man be happy and grieve no more forever!