by the agitators in prison, to hold no more outdoor meetings and use no more incendiary language if the charges against them were dismissed, was refused, and special counsel were employed to prosecute. Outside the prison the same drunken spirit of arbitrary repression showed itself, not only by driving crowds from the streets, but by breaking up indoor meetings and installing captains of police as censors.
The reaction was swift and strong, but it was not at first heeded. The charges against the agitators were dismissed by the judge before whom they were brought, but fresh charges were made, which were dismissed by juries. An ordinance was rushed through the Board of Supervisors, under which it has never been dared to bring an action; a ridiculously oppressive law was hurried through the Legislature, which was similarly a dead letter, and which at the next session was repealed without a dissenting voice and hardly a dissenting vote.
These impotent attempts at repression produced their natural result. The new party was fairly started, brought into prominence and importance by the intemperance which had sought to crush it.
The feeling on the Chinese question has long been so strong in California as to give certain victory to any party that could fully utilize it. But the difficulty in the way of making political capital of this feeling has been to get resistance, since all parties were willing to take the strongest anti-Chinese ground. But the fear that the agitators had evidently inspired, the effort to put them down, served as such resistance; and, though all parties were anti-Chinese, the party they were endeavoring to start became at once the anti-Chinese party in the eyes of those who were bitterest and strongest in their feeling, while it at the same time became an expression, though rudely and vaguely, of all sorts of discontent. It was evident that it would be a political power for at least one election. The lower strata of ward politicians went rushing into it as a good chance for office; the "Chronicle," which, at the first symptom of reaction, had redoubled its services, placarded the State with resolutions of the new party asking workingmen to stop the "Call." That paper, losing heavily in subscribers, quietly began to outdo the "Chronicle" in its reports and its puffery. Other papers, recognized as organs of interests popularly regarded with dislike, did their utmost by denunciation to keep Kearney in the foreground. Republican politicians saw in the movement a division of the Democratic vote worth fostering; Democratic politicians saw in it an element of future success, on the right side of which the political wise man would keep; the municipal authorities, remembering coming elections, passed from persecution to obsequiousness; while the great railroad interest either came to a tacit understanding, or had its agents install themselves in the new organization,[1] using it to help their friends
- ↑ There have been no more meetings on Nob Hill, or denunciation of the railroad magnates or great bonanza firm. On the contrary, all the officials elected by the workingmen seem to have been either employees or friends of the railroad, or people who
