Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/465

Rh political movement growing from and taking advantage of popular discontent; while the new Constitution of California, destitute as it is of any shadow of reform which will lessen social inequalities or purify politics, exhibits the same tendencies as the newer constitutions of other States.

That Kearney or any considerable number of his followers ever seriously thought of an appeal to force, either to get rid of the Chinese or for any other purpose, I have not the slightest idea. The workingmen's military companies, of which a few were formed, would not have been at any time a flea-bite to the strong and well-appointed militia of the city, and were merely an amusement—a sort of set-off and imitation of the Committee of Public Safety. And it must be remembered that these vague suggestions of violence not only, as I have before said, secured resistance which turned latent force into political power, but the agitation did considerably check Chinese employment and immigration, while the passage of an anti-Chinese bill by Congress (though this bill was denounced at the time by Kearney), was claimed as one of its results.

And though capital has been frightened, at times seriously frightened, by this agitation, it must not be thought that this fright has been shared by all the property classes. On the contrary, the inner and influential circle of Kearney's backers and supporters have been men of more or less property, and large moneyed interests have sought to use the movement. Neither in platforms nor candidates has there been any leaning to the questioning of property rights. One Parisian communist was elected to the Convention, but he exercised no influence, and was expelled from the party for refusing to support the new Constitution. But, with this exception, the Workingmen's candidates have been no more radical than the average of American politicians. At the last election, for instance, their ticket was headed by a graduate of the University of California, who has been prominent in the party since it first assumed importance, and one of its candidates at every election. He belongs to a Jewish family who do a profitable manufacturing business, and not only disclaimed anything like socialism or agrarianism, but appealed to the corporation lawyers with whom he served in the Convention to certify to his conservatism. And next to him came a rich land-owner who has given a hundred thousand dollars for the establishment of a law-school, of which he is dean. What Kearney and his party have practically proposed has been merely the remedy which their preachers, teachers, and influential newspapers are constantly prescribing to the American people as the great cure-all—elect honest men to office, and have them cut down taxation; a remedy which belongs to the same category as the recipe for catching a little bird by sprinkling salt on its tail!

Now, I do not mean to say that there has been nothing in this movement to excite alarm; that the classes whose fright has led them