GOLD-QUARTZ AND SOCIETY.

The Burns Ranch Union Mining Company in California have published a prospectus—we suppose to facilitate the sale of their stock—and the writer indulges in some speculations respecting the influence of the discovery that the chief mineral riches of the new state are in mines, instead of the sands of rivers, thus:

It appears to be the destiny of America to carry on the greatness of the future, and that Providence—which shapes the ends of nations as well as of persons, at a time when it was most needful for the prosecution of her mission, when war and the expedients of political strategy are out of vogue, and the people is most powerful of which the individual civilization, energy, ambition, and resources are greatest—that Providence, at this crisis, has opened the veins of the Continent, slumbering so many thousand years, in order that we might derive from them all that remained necessary for investing the United States with the leadership of the world.

The first intelligence of the discovery of gold in California fell upon the general mind like news of a great and peculiar revolution. It was at once—even before the statements on the subject assumed a definite or certain form—it was at once felt that a new hour was signally on the dial-plate of history. Immediately, those immense fortunes which were acquired by the Portuguese and Spaniards nearly four centuries ago—fortunes which, in the decline of nations, have still remained in families as the sign and substance of the only nobility and power which mankind at large acknowledge—those astonishing fortunes which raised the enterprising poor man to the dignity and happiness of the most elevated classes in society, were recalled, and made suggestive of like successes to new and more hardy adventurers. The reports came with increased volume; every ship confirmed the rumors brought by its predecessor, and new intelligence, that, in its turn, tasked the popular credulity; and it came soon to be understood that we had found a land literally flowing with gold and silver, as that promised to the earlier favorites of Heaven did with milk and honey. As many as were free from controlling engagements, and had means with which to do so, started for our El Dorado, making haste, in fear that the wealth of the country would quickly be exhausted—not dreaming, even yet, that there was any thing to be acquired but flakes and scales and scattered masses of ore, which would be exhausted by the first hunters who should scour the rivers and turn the surface soil.

But at length the geologists began to apprehend, what experience soon confirmed, that, extraordinary as were the amounts of gold found in drifts of gravel, and deposits that had been left in the beds of streams, these were merely the signs of far greater riches—merely indexes of the presence of rocks and hills, and underlayers of plains, impregnated with gold, in quantities that the processes of nature could never disclose, and that would reward only the scientific efforts of miners having all the mechanical appliances which the laborious experiments of other nations had invented. The fact of the existence of veins of gold in vast quartz formations, and ribs of gold in hills, was as startling almost as the first news of the presence of the precious metal in the country. This at once changed the prospect, and from a game of chance, elevated the pursuit of gold in California to a grand industrial purpose, requiring an energy and sagacity that invest it with the highest dignity, and to such energy and sagacity promising, with absolute certainty, rewards that make it worthy of the greatest ambition.

Now, men of character and capital—the class of men whose speculating spirit is held in subjection by the most exact reason—began to turn to the subject their investigations, and to connect with it their plans. This will account for the fact that has so much astonished the world, which had supposed our Pacific colony to be composed of the reckless, profligate and desperate only—the fact, that when California made her constitution of government, it shot at once in unquestionable wisdom directly and far in advance of all the states on the Atlantic, presenting to mankind the very highest type of a free government that had ever been conceived. The demonstration that California was a mine, like other mines in all but its surpassing richness, elevated it from a scene of gambling to one for the orderly pursuit of riches, and by the splendor of its promises, drew to it the most sagacious and most heroical intelligences of the time.

Astonishing as are the present and prospective results of the discovery in California, however, we are not to suppose that there is any possibility of a decline in the value of the precious metals. In absolute material civilization, the world in the last three-quarters of a century has advanced more than it had in any previous three full centuries; and the supply of gold, for currency and the thousand other objects for which it was demanded, was becoming alarmingly insufficient, so that the addition of more than thirty per cent. to the total annual product of the world, which we are led by the officially-stated results thus far to expect from California, will merely preserve the historical and necessary proportion and standard value.