"While the people of California were looking to Congress for a territorial government, it was quite evident that such an organization was daily becoming less suited to their condition, which was entirely different from that of any of the territories out of which the new States of the Union had been formed.
"Those territories had been at first slowly and sparsely peopled by a few hunters and farmers, who penetrated the wilderness, or traveled the prairies, in search of game or a new home; and, when thus gradually their population warranted it, a government was provided for them. They, however, had no foreign commerce, nor any thing beyond the ordinary pursuits of agriculture, and the various branches of business which usually accompany it, to induce immigration within their borders. Several years were required to give them sufficient population and wealth to place them in a condition to require, or enable them to support, a State government.
"Not so with California. The discovery of the vast metallic and mineral wealth in her mountains had already attracted to her, in the space of twelve months, more than one hundred thousand people. An extensive commerce had sprung up with China, the ports of Mexico on the Pacific, Chili, and Australia.
"Hundreds of vessels from the Atlantic ports of the Union, freighted with our manufactures and agricultural products, and filled with our fellow-citizens, had arrived, or were on their passage round Cape Horn; so that, in the month of June last, (1849) there were more than three hundred sea-going vessels in the port of San Francisco.
"California has a border on the Pacific of ten degrees of latitude, and several important harbors which have never been surveyed; nor is there a buoy, a beacon, a lighthouse, or a fortification, on the whole coast.
"There are no docks for the repair of national or mercantile vessels nearer than New York, a distance of some twenty thousand miles round Cape Horn.
"All these things, together with the proper regulations for the gold region, the quicksilver mines, the survey and disposition of the public lands, the adjustment of land titles, the establishment of a mint and of marine hospitals, required the immediate formation of a more perfect civil government than California then had, and the fostering care of Congress and the Executive.