In the times of national stress, he paid his debts in gold and asked the same of his creditors, regardless of the laws or customs of the rest of the United States.  To him gold is still money and a national promise to pay is not.  The general welfare is not a catchword with him.  His affairs are individual.  But he is not stingy for all this.  It is rather a form of largeness, of tolerance.  He is as generous as the best, and takes what the Fates send him with cheerful enthusiasm.  Flood and drought, temblor and conflagration, boom and panic — each comes in “the day’s work,” and each alike finds him alert, hopeful, resourceful and unafraid.

The typical Californian has largely outgrown provincialism.  He has seen much of the world, and he knows the varied worth of varied lands.  He travels more widely than the man of any other state, and he has the education which travel gives.  As a rule, the well-to-do Californian knows Europe better than the average Eastern man of equal financial resources, and the chances are that his range of experience includes Japan, China, New Zealand and Australia as well.  A knowledge of his own country is a matter of course.  He has no sympathy with “the essential provinciality of the mind which knows the Eastern seaboard, and has some measure of acquaintance with countries and cities, and with men from Ireland to Italy, but which is densely ignorant of our own vast domain, and thinks that all which lies beyond Philadelphia belongs to the West.”  Not that provincialism is unknown in California, or that its occasional exhibition is any less absurd or offensive here than elsewhere.  For example, one may note a tendency to set up local standards for literary work done in California.  Another more harmful idea is to insist that methods outworn in the schools elsewhere are good because they are Californian.  This is the usual provincialism of ignorance, and it is found the world over.  Especially is it characteristic of centers of population.  When men come into contact with men instead of with the forces of nature, they mistake their own conventionalities for the facts of existence.  It is not what life is, but what “the singular mess we agree to call life” is, that interests them.  In this fashion they lose their real understanding of affairs, become the toys of their local environment, and are marked as provincials or tenderfeet when they stray away from home.

California is emphatically one of “earth’s male lands,” to accept Browning’s classification.  The first Saxon settlers were men, and in their rude civilization women had little part.  For years women in California were objects of curiosity or of chivalry, disturbing rather than cementing influences in society.  Even yet California is essentially a man’s state.  It is common to say that public opinion does not exist there; but such a statement is not wholly correct.  It does exist, but it is an out-of-door public opinion — a man’s view of men.  There is, for example, a strong