Page:History of California, Volume 3 (Bancroft).djvu/282

264 it was not doubted that the Natalia could be made to pay for herself; and it was hoped that such a monopoly of a growing California trade might be secured as to justify the purchase of other vessels and enrich the partners. So far as is apparent, the paid-up capital of the Compañía Cosmopolitana was nothing.

It has been supposed that there were also connected with the colony certain mysterious schemes of a political nature, by which Gomez Farías hoped, in case his administration should be overthrown, to find in California a refuge for himself and his political friends, a stronghold from which as a centre to work for a restoration of his power in Mexico, or at the last, a rich province where he and his partisans might live in affluence and security. There is some slight evidence, as we shall see, that suspicions of this kind were entertained in Mexico; but I deem them for the most part unfounded; though the vice-president may very likely have deemed it desirable to put even so distant a territory as California under the control of his political friends.

Vallejo, Osio, Alvarado, and other Californians who more or less fully reflect their views, denounce the whole colonization plan of Híjar and Padrés as a deliberately concocted plot to plunder the missions under the protection of the highest political and military authorities, who were themselves to share the spoils. This is to go much further than is justified by the evidence. The enterprise of Híjar and Padrés was on its face a legitimate one. Colonization had long been regarded by intelligent men as a measure of absolute necessity for California's welfare, and the impolicy and impossibility of attempting to continue the old monastico-missionary régime was equally apparent. The objects ostensibly were praiseworthy; the