Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/462

446 stump-speech, and mandamus. But it is anything but agrarian or communistic, for it intrenches vested rights—especially in land—more thoroughly than before, and interposes barriers to future radicalism by a provision in regard to amendments which it will require almost a revolution to break through. It is anything but a workingman's Constitution: it levies a poll-tax without exemption, disfranchises a considerable part of the floating laboring vote, introduces a property qualification, prevents the opening of public works in emergencies, and in various ways, which workingmen, even in their present stage of enlightenment, may easily see, sacrifices the interests of the laboring classes, as well as the capitalist, to what the land-owners regard as their interests, while in other respects its changes, which are in the same direction as other late constitutions, are out of the line of true reform.

But anything like calm discussion of the work of the Convention became impossible. The moneyed classes of San Francisco, taking alarm at the taxation clauses, raised a fund of some hundreds of thousands of dollars to defeat the new Constitution, which was placed in the hands of the head lobbyists of the railroad company, and a regular bureau opened, while threats of the discharge of employees and withdrawal of patronage as penalty for voting for it were freely made. If, as believed by many, large special interests were engaged in the support of the new Constitution, they had the intelligence to work quietly. On the surface it seemed as if every tyrannous and corrupt influence was united for its defeat. In the torrent of passion which raged, it is difficult to say whether those who opposed or those who advocated the new Constitution said the most absurd things. On the one side it was denounced as a "communistic" instrument which would bring every calamity, on the other it was advocated as "the Magna Charta of the laboring classes." The real agrarians and communists, if these terms be applied to men who desire fundamental changes, opposed the new Constitution all they could. But the fact that enormous sums were being spent to defeat it, subjected every one who opposed it to the imputation of being the hireling of anti-popular interests. And so, with the solid vote of the farmers, aided largely by the vote of those who lose most by it, the new Constitution was carried.

In this contest the Workingmen had become, as in the Convention, a sort of tail to the Grangers' kite, and Kearney had to a great extent been forced into the background, while a number of old "war-horses" came to the front. The "Chronicle," which had made a vigorous fight for the new Constitution, saw in this combination an opportunity to make a new party of its own which should fill all the offices under the new instrument, and Kearney was given to understand that he might now retire on his laurels. This he very vigorously declined to do, and war between the late allies commenced, the "Chronicle" printing with little immediate effect long exposures of the man it had so much lauded, and Kearney denouncing the New Constitutionalists as "