OCR Text |
Show TWO YEARS OF CHANGE. 127 wealth and intelligence to aid us. Wyoming can not sustain a popu-lation equal to that of Rhode Island ; Idaho is scarcely more fertile ; the child is not born that will live to see half a million people resident in the Great Basin. Colorado, has a population nearly equal to that of Utah ; New Mexico has a population equal perhaps to that it had three hundred years ago. It is evident that our form of government must be modified for such communities. Ideal civil systems may furnish amusement for scholars ; but a people can only use such a goverment as it has grown to. That " lynch law" should largely prevail all over the West, was as natural, nay, as imperative, as that common and statute law should prevail in New England. Wyoming, for instance, contains 98,000 square miles^ and less than 20,000 people; an area more than twice the size of Pennsylvania, with half the population of an average county ! Along the Pacific Railway, in the southern part of the Territory, are a few trading towns ; all the rest is grassy plains, mountain and desert, traversed only by mining, wooding, hunting or herding parties. A criminal can take a horse from any town and be in the trackless wilder-ness in two hours. When arrested according to statute a posse must convey him perhaps hundreds of miles, to the nearest jail, and all the witnesses must take the same trip three or four times. Perhaps before final trial there is a mining " stampede," or an, Indian war, and all the witnesses leave. It would never do. Justice must be brougOht home to every little hamlet, and so the Themis of the Rocky Mountains is a wild huntress. The few inhabitants must act promptly before the criminal has time to escape ; if it is rape, arson, murder or an aggra-vated case of horse- stealing, he dies ; if a minor offense, a severe cow-hiding suffices. Who shall blame them ? Justice must be administered, or no man's life is safe an hour. It is charged that they sometimes make mistakes. I have not heard that the regular courts are infallible. The Territories will soon present an awkward question. It will never do to admit any more " rotten- borough" States; it would de-moralize the Senate, and destroy all decent respect for the Federal system. We have already gone dangerously near to that consumma-tion. In certain contingencies one- fifth of the people could elect a President against the united voice of the four- fifths. And yet the territorial condition is anomalous, and to some extent unrepublican. A great reform would be to allow them to choose all their executive officers; the President to appoint only such officials as attend to United States business. Utah might be annexed entire to Nevada; the two would then make a State with population enough for one |