"The sale of the territory by Mexico to the United States had necessarily cut off or dissolved the laws regulating the granting or procuring titles to land; and, as our own land-laws had not been extended over it, the people were compelled to receive such titles as were offered to them, without the means of ascertaining whether they were valid or not.
"Litigation was so expensive and precarious that injustice and oppression were frequently endured, rather than resort to so uncertain a remedy.
"Towns and cities were springing into existence; many of them without charters or any legal right to organize municipal authorities, or to tax property or the citizens for the establishment of a police, the erection of prisons, or providing any of those means for the protection of life and property which are so necessary in all civil communities, and especially among a people mostly strangers to each other.
"Nearly one million and a half of dollars had been paid into the custom-house, as duties on imported goods, before our revenue laws had been extended over the country; and the people complained bitterly that they were thus heavily taxed without being provided with a government for their protection, or laws which they could understand, or allowed the right to be represented in the councils of the nation.
"While anxiously waiting the action of Congress, oppressed and embarrassed by this state of affairs, and feeling the pressing necessity of applying such remedies as were in their power, and circumstances seemed to justify, they resolved to substitute laws of their own for the existing system, and to establish tribunals for their proper and faithful administration.
"In obedience, therefore, to the extraordinary exigencies of their condition, the people of the city of San Francisco elected members to form a legislature, and clothed them with full powers to pass laws.
"The communities of Sonoma and of Sacramento city followed the example.
"Thus were three legislative bodies organized; the two most distant being only one hundred and thirty miles apart.
"Other movements of the kind were threatened, and doubtless would have followed, in other sections of the territory, had they not been arrested by the formation of a State government.