Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/817

Rh values, and the development of the Comstock, long prevented the popular recognition of the gravity of the problem. When knowledge came, it came swiftly and bitterly. Workingmen who had been earning five or six dollars a day, found, in three or four years, that their wages were forty per cent lower. They felt Chinese competition far more, and other laborers were coming in. The farmers found the price of wheat falling, and ships leaving the coast because of railroad competition, so that freights rose. The merchants found the area of tributary country diminished by the creation of other commercial centers. California suffered more in the necessary readjustment than did any other part of the Pacific coast, because its growth had been much more rapid, its resources had been larger, and it had had, in the historic sense, a far more educating environment. The commonwealth of California was not merely the colony of gold-seekers of '49; it was, in the broader view, the result of American energy working upon the old foundations laid by Spanish pioneers of the eighteenth century; it had its missions and its olive groves before the American Declaration of Independence, when all the rest of the Pacific coast was an unknown wilderness. It could not be otherwise than that the change in economic conditions struck to the heart of Californian life, and seemed for a few years to have produced the disaster of a permanent descent to lower ideals.

"Californians," said a brilliant newspaper man to me during that period, "were once the most magnificently liberal race of men on earth; now they have determined to become the most miserly. Once they talked of endowing a university with twenty million dollars; now they have let President Gilman leave them and go to Baltimore. Once they were proud of everything Californian; now they want a foreign trade-mark on everything."

During the period that I have called the transition era, extending over eight or ten years after 1870, political standards in California were lowered to an extent, in both kind and degree, which is difficult to explain, and which has hardly changed since, except for the worse. All the links and fetters of party allegiance were more tightly drawn. The rule of the purse was more and more pre-eminent in every campaign, and no party or faction long resisted temptation. An almost unbroken line of demagogues, numbered and branded by political bosses, and divided with amusing evenness between the Democrats and the Republicans, misruled the State and increased the expenses of government. The lowering of the remarkably advantageous economic conditions of a quarter of a century ago appears to have thrown many unthinking voters into closer relations with "the bosses" and so has made honest politics a more difficult business. It is the most deplorable result of that sudden outbreak of discontent called