Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/464

448 made no parades. To this organization, however, I do not attribute the defeat of the Workingmen in the March election in San Francisco for a joint Senator and freeholders to frame a charter. It was in the natural course of things that the Workingmen should be beaten, even though the Democratic organization endorsed their candidate for Senator and nominated no freeholders. For a party without national affiliations or definite aims must die with its first success, and this is peculiarly a party that has been only kept alive by the mistakes of its opponents.

That Kearneyism had run its course was clearly evident in San Francisco after this election. The new Constitution has proved a bitter disappointment to those who expected so much from it; the officials elected by Workingmen have proved no particular improvement; disintegration was fast showing itself in the clubs, and Kearney was rapidly losing his popularity and influence with the class that had followed him. But a perceptible check was given to this decline when Kearney was sent to jail and fined a thousand dollars for an offense ordinarily punished by a trivial fine when punished at all. Thus made a victim, Kearney every day he staid in jail was gaining in popularity and strength as he had before, and when released by the Supreme Court was drawn in triumph through the streets on one of his own drays.

This brief sketch, though necessarily very imperfect, will accomplish all I intend if it makes the general facts and course of this agitation sufficiently intelligible to enable thoughtful men to see its true relations and real meaning. That a rude, uncultured drayman, with no previous influence over any class, should acquire such notoriety and wield such power, that a great city should so long have been kept in a state of excitement, are phenomena which more imperatively demand that careful and dispassionate attention which we call scientific than any conjuncture of the planets or appearance of spots on the sun. For, while we know that during unnumbered ages this great celestial machine has pursued its orderly movements, we also know that, while day has followed night and harvest succeeded seed-time, human society has been subject to the most terrible perturbations and cataclysms. And what has been going on in California betokens the social unrest and discontent from which destructive forces are generated.

That these events do not spring from exotic or abnormal causes seems to me clear. This agitation is not the result of the importation of foreign ideas, but the natural result of social and political conditions toward which the country as a whole steadily tends, and its development has been on lines strictly American. Kearney is not a type of the fanatical reformer, but of the politician, and possibly in a rough sort of way, not of the "coming Cæsar" of whom we hear so much, but of the real Cæsar whom we may one day evoke; the workingman's movement has been essentially nothing more than an ordinary