DISCLAIMER: The following are direct quotes from Josiah Royce's From California: A Study of American Character
The attitude that chance, the choice of one or two representative men, and our national character made us assume towards the Californians a the moment of our appearance among them as conquerors, we have ever since kept, with disaster to them, and not without disgrace and degradation to ourselves.
Nor our desire for California in itself an evil. However difficult the righteous satisfaction of the desire might prove, the desire was inevitable.
The Mexican War, if deliberately schemed, and fore into life through our aggressive policy, would be indeed a crime; but it would be adding another great crime if we wronged these nearly independent Californians, while assailing their unkind but helpless mother.
The proclamation of the sovereign state itself is only as the sound of the trumpet, signaling the beginning of the real social battle.
...nothing have shall remained pure: most ministers who happened to be intent gambled, society was ruled by courtesans, nobody looked twice as the freshly murdered man, everybody gayly joined in lynching any supposed thief, and alike rejoiced in raptures of vicious liberty.
Their greatest calamities they learned to laugh at, their greatest blunders they soon recovered from; and even while they boasted of their prowess, and denied their sins, they would quietly go on to correct their past grievous errors, good-humored and self-confident as ever.
They sought wealth, and not social order.
WORK CITED:
Hicks, Jack et al. From California: A Study of American Character. The Literature of California, vol. 1, University of California Press, 2000, pp. 279-286
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