Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/453

Rh about hanging official thieves and renegade representatives, and the armed organizations of workingmen, which have seemed at the East like the importations of foreign communism, are in large measure but reflections and exaggerations of ideas current in San Francisco counting-rooms and bank parlors. And it must be remembered, in estimating the influence of this idea, that the Vigilance Committee of 1856 was not merely successful in its immediate purposes, but gave birth to a political organization that for many years thereafter managed the local government and disposed of all its large prizes.

Yet, acting with and running through this, has been, I think, a wider and more generally diffused feeling—the disposition toward sharp repressive measures which is aroused among the wealthy classes by symptoms of dissatisfaction and aggression among the poor. That this feeling has of late years been growing throughout the Union many indications show.

Be all this as it may, the impulse that began these California—agitations came from the East. For the genesis of Kearneyism, or rather for the shock that set in motion forces that social and political discontent had been generating, we must look to Pittsburgh and to the great railroad strikes of 1877.

In California, where a similar strike was about beginning—for the railroad company had given notice of a like reduction of wages—these strikes excited an interest that became intense when the telegraph told of the burning and fighting in Pittsburgh. The railroad magnates, becoming alarmed, rescinded their notice, but in the mean time a meeting to express sympathy with the Eastern strikers had been called for the sand-lot in front of the new City Hall. This meeting was called in response to a request of Eastern labor papers, but happened to fall amid the excitement caused by the Pittsburgh riot. The over-zealous authorities, catching, perhaps, the alarm that had induced the railroad managers to rescind their reduction, arrested men who were carrying placards advertising the meeting. In the excitement, wild reports flew through the city that an incendiary meeting was to be held, and an attempt made to burn the Pacific Mail Docks and Chinese quarter. The meeting was held, for the authorities soon saw that there was no reason for preventing it. There was no talk of lawlessness or allusion to the Chinese on the part of the promoters of the meeting or their speakers, but the excitement showed itself by the raising, on the outskirts of the immense crowd, of the cry, "To Chinatown!" a movement promptly stopped by the police; and in remoter districts some Chinese wash-houses were raided by gangs of boys. The papers—sensational to the last degree—made the most of this the next morning, and, in the excitement that the Eastern news had created, a meeting, held in the rooms of the Chamber of Commerce, organized a Committee of Public Safety, with the President of the Vigilance Committee of 1856 at its head, the hint being probably given by a telegram that