this Union, with only such limitations as are expressed in the section in which this power is given.  The government, of which Colonel Mason was the executive, had its origin in the lawful exercise of a belligerent right over a conquered territory.  It had been instituted during the war by the command of the President of the United States.  It was the government when the territory was ceded as a conquest, and it did not cease, as a matter of course, or as a necessary consequence of the restoration of peace.  The President might have dissolved it by withdrawing the army and navy officers who administered it, but he did not do so.  Congress could have put an end to it, but that was not done.  The right inference from the inaction of both is, that it was meant to be continued until it had been legislatively changed.  No presumption of a contrary intention can be made.  Whatever may have been the causes of delay, it must be presumed that the delay was consistent with the true policy of the Government[5].”

This guess, being the last guess, must now be taken as authoritative.

The prospectors and miners were, then, in the start, simply trespassers upon the public lands as against the Government of the United States, with no laws to guide, restrain or protect them, and with nothing to fear from the military authorities.  They were equal to the occasion.  The instinct of organization was a part of their heredity.  Professor Macy, in a treatise issued by Johns Hopkins University, once wrote:  “It has been said that if three Americans meet to talk over an item of business, the first thing they do is to organize.”

“Finding themselves far from the legal traditions and restraints of the settled East,” said the report of the Public Land Commission of 1880, “in a pathless wilderness, under the feverish excitement of an industry as swift and full of chance as the throwing of dice, the adventurers of 1849 spontaneously instituted neighborhood or district codes of regulation, which were simply meant to define and protect a brief possessory ownership.  The ravines and river bars which held the placer gold were valueless for settlement or home-making, but were splendid stakes to hold for a few short seasons and gamble with nature for wealth or ruin.

“In the absence of State and Federal laws competent to meet the novel industry, and with the inbred respect for equitable adjustments of rights between man and man, the miners sought only to secure equitable rights and protection from robbery by a simple agreement as to the maximum size of a surface claim, trusting, with a well-founded confidence, that no machinery was necessary to enforce their regulations other than the swift, rough blows of public opinion.  The gold-seekers were not long in realizing that the source of the dust which had worked its way into the sands and bars, and distributed its precious particles over the bedrocks of rivers was derived from solid quartz