Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/450

434 such as this, I can, however, do little more than correct some misapprehensions and put the main facts in such relations that their bearing may be seen. Much that would conduce to complete intelligibility must, from the limit of space, be omitted.

What seems to be the general idea of these events is well suggested by one of Nast's cartoons—a hideous figure, girt with revolver and sword, broadly badged as "communist," brandishing in one hand the torch of anarchy, and in the other exhibiting a scroll on which is inscribed: "Mob Law. The New Constitution of California. Other people's homes, savings, land, property, lives, capital, and honest labor, all common stock in the universal coöperative brotherhood." In the distance a group of workmen stand idle and cowering, while underneath is the device, "Constant Vigilance (Committee) is the price of liberty in San Francisco."

While such ideas are but exaggerated reflections of the utterances of San Francisco papers, they are wide of the truth. There has not been in San Francisco any outbreak of "foreign communism," nor yet has there been in the workingman's movement, or in its results, anything socialistic or agrarian. This movement has in reality been inspired by ordinary political aims, and what has been going on in California derives its real interest from its relation to general facts and its illustration of general tendencies.

While there has been much in these events to recall to the cool observer the saying of Carlyle, "There are twenty-eight millions of people in Great Britain, mostly fools," it is yet a mistake to regard California as a community widely differing from more Eastern States. I am, in fact, inclined rather to look upon California as a typical American State, and San Francisco as a typical American city. It would be difficult to name any State that in resources, climate, and industries comes nearer to representing the whole Union, while, as all the other States have contributed to her population in something like relative proportions, general American characteristics remain, as local peculiarities are in the attrition worn off. There is, of course, a greater mobility of society than in older communities, and this may give rise to a certain excitability and fickleness. But, everywhere, the mobility of population increases with the relative growth of cities and the increase of facilities of movement. And, in fact, the newness and plasticity of society in such a State as California permits general tendencies to show themselves more quickly than in older sections, just as in the younger and more flexible parts of the tree the direction of the wind is most easily seen.

Though yet comparatively a small city, San Francisco is in character more metropolitan than any other American city except New York, and is, to the territory and population of which she is the commercial, industrial, financial, and political center, even more of a center than is New York. San Francisco has no rival. For long distances