Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/14

Rh great legislator does not run for office, so there is no way of proving that the voters of Oregon appreciate his service, but they elect his laws, and that's all he asks. He leads and the people follow his leadership.

But the most amazing example of the democracy of democracy is the case of Rudolph Spreckels. A capitalist, the president of the First National Bank of San Francisco, and a millionaire in his own right, this young man is a member of the rich, aggressive, unpopular Spreckels family of California, and, personally autocratic, unbending, hard, it did seem impossible that he should be able to lead the fight against the low vice and the high financial corruption of the so-called Labour administration of his city. And most of his own kind of people opposed, and they still doubt him, but the common people, the rank and file of the uneducated, anonymous mob—they followed him. They, too, jeered at first, and he never replied or explained. Francis J. Heney did; the prosecutor told the people everything. But Spreckels did his work in his private, business-like, undemocratic way; and the people watched him from afar. And, making thus at long range their quiet study of the man, they were able to penetrate class and party prejudice and a cloud of evidence as thick as a Pacific fog—