its soil and climate, and are everywhere in demand, and must increase in proportion to the growth of its people?

Yet this growth has been checked during the last two years by causes wholly distinct from any that have heretofore interfered with the prosperity of any American city. No fire like that of Chicago has devastated San Francisco. No pestilence has driven away our people, as from Memphis or New Orleans. Our trade has not been diverted by a successful rival. No war has interrupted our commerce, no floods or droughts have destroyed the staples in which we deal. Yet our banking capital and deposits were reduced during 1879 twenty-three millions of dollars. The loans made on mortgages in the city have fallen from twenty-four millions in 1877 to fifteen millions in 1878, and nine and a half millions in 1879—the releases exceeding the amounts loaned. Our rich men are fleeing to the East and to Europe. No new enterprises are being undertaken. Old ones are winding up, or curtailing their business. Money never was so abundant for loans upon or the purchase of securities of undoubted character, like United States bonds, now quoted at one hundred and seven, though paying only four per cent. interest per annum; but it is not to be had at any price, where the slightest risk is involved in its use, or for loans on country property. Real estate is everywhere unsalable, or will bring but a fraction of its recent value. Building has almost ceased. Many poor are out of employment, and parade the streets by hundreds, demanding work or bread; and the charitable are called on daily, almost hourly, to contribute toward the support of those who, even in this State, with the mildest clime and most productive soil on the face of the earth, are unable to give an equivalent for their living. Probably half the people of the city are brooding over the wrongs, real or imaginary, inflicted on them by the other half. The poor are exasperated against the rich, and Sunday after Sunday, in mass-meeting assembled, they are accustomed to gloat over the blasphemy, the ribaldry, and communistic threats of the leaders of the sand-lot. The rich have learned to fear and hate the turbulent class, thus banded together, apparently for their destruction. We seem to be trembling over a mine or volcano, and to expect the momentary annihilation of all we hold dear. We hear of military companies, perhaps regiments, organized and drilling, to fight for they know not what. All other classes have now massed themselves for defense against the expected émeute. The Federal Government is assembling troops in the same behalf, and the eyes of

the press everywhere are riveted upon us, in confident foreboding of speedy bloodshed and civil war. What is all this about, and how does it happen that our hitherto flourishing State has drifted into such an epileptic condition?

We hear much of Kearney and Kearneyism, yet what is Kearney but the exponent of a state of public feeling, the outcropping of the ledge that has for years been crystallizing beneath the surface? The short-sighted and sensational press which has made him an object of such prominence, without whose daily trumpetings he would never have left his dray, would now have us believe that if he and a few of his followers were quieted or removed, the existing agitation would cease. And so seem to think the twenty thousand citizens who have recently formed themselves into a committee for the maintenance of law and order. But "the wish is father to the thought." They forget that a new Constitution, ratified by a majority of eleven thousand votes in city and country, has sanctioned the principles of the Workingmen and Grangers as the fundamental law of the land. They forget that this document, for the first time in American constitutional history, has formulated the claims of labor against capital, and proclaims to the world that unlimited freedom of acquisition is here recognized as an evil, to be curbed by the strong arm of the law!

Time was when inequality among various classes of society was everywhere recognized as the law of nature, and enforced by the law of the land. Authority was the privilege of the few. Power emanated from God only, through the divine right of kings and the sacred prerogatives of the church. For the masses was reserved only such happiness as remained after their powers were exhausted in the service of their masters, in the church, in the army, or in the state.

But the bloody revolutions of the last three centuries, culminating in those of France and the United States, have swept away these systems of the past, and made the Golden Rule a fundamental maxim of politics, particularly in the United States. For in what does the precept, "do unto others as you would they should unto you," differ in principle from the definition of political liberty, "that every one is free to do as he pleases so long as he does harm to no one else"?

Behold, then, our American population recognizing the great fact that all men are born free and equal, and with the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A century ago, when these principles were first published to the world as the corner-stone of a government,

the social and economic condition of the American people was, like their political status, a remarkable example of equality. For the remnants of aristocratic pretention—the few large landed estates inherited from their colonial condition-were rapidly dissipated under the influence of the new order of things. No apprehension was entertained by the fathers that by the adoption from the common law of England of the most rigid protection of the rights of property, danger would accrue to the future equality of the people. So our laws, like those of all civilized countries, sanction the absolute title of every man to his inherited property, as well as to the fruits of his own industry and talent. Hence is supplied to every man the highest possible motive so to exert and demean himself as to become an independent and useful citizen. While the country was new, and population sparse, a degree of prosperity was developed in the United States, under the law of laissez-faire, far exceeding that of any other country during any similar period. In fact, so great has been our progress, that under the concentrated brain-power of the whole people, all bent upon the acquisition of a fortune in the shortest possible time, ten thousand new devices have been brought to bear upon that object, until the size and number of individual capitals has been increased beyond the conception of the most sanguine economists of the eighteenth century. The corporation, then a rarity, and created only by royal decree or special enactment, has become a spontaneous growth everywhere under free corporation laws, and furnishes a means of aggregating wealth in any desired interest, such as our ancestors never dreamed of.

It is now more apparent than ever before that wealth-even more than knowledge-is power. Comparatively unnoticed in former ages as but one among many mountainous inequalities of society, the subsidence of all the others leaves the power of wealth predominating, like Mount Diablo, over the vast level of American institutions. Our laws, indeed, confine the equality of our people to the equal protection of the rights and property of each citizen, yet their very operation protects the inequality of condition arising from the diversity of natural gifts among the people.

But this is not the worst aspect of the case. The power of the despot may have crushed the spirit of independence of the subject, but it often developed personal courage, loyalty, and devotion to country among the people. The power of the church destroyed free thought, but often cultivated purity of morals. But the power of wealth is the most demoralizing of all.

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Where wealth accumulates, there men decay;" for its exercise, when opposed, as it too often is, to the mandates of law and the interests of the masses, can be made available only through the stimulation of all the meaner vices of human nature.

Is it, then, to be wondered at that the astonishing accumulation and combination of capiital-especially in corporate form-should, for years back, have excited the apprehensions of thoughtful and patriotic citizens throughout the republic? Is it strange that counter-combinations of labor have everywhere organized strikes and lock-outs, until the condition of warfare between capital and labor has become chronic? Is it anything but natural that Tar Flat should deem its rights invaded by Nob Hill; that the ideal equality taught by our laws should sharpen the popular perception of the actual inequality resulting from those laws; that the ignorant foreigner should think but lightly of the right to vote, unless it secure him the right to eat; that the independence taught by our system should cause the gorge to rise at the idea of dependence upon another's capital or favor as the condition of livelihood; that equality of the means of living should be deemed a natural right, as well as equality before the law; and that the American system should be adjudged by one class a mistake, opposed to the natural stratification of society, and by another class as at best an expression of but half the truth, and requiring communism or coöperation to supplement it?

And so society is divided against itself as to what ought to be the rights of persons versus what are the rights of things. This controversy, like an earthquake, shakes the very foundation of government; for all existing institutions are based upon the right of every man to keep whatever he can lawfully get, in the nature of property, and the corresponding necessity of doing without what he can not lawfully acquire, though it be food for himself and a starving family. The hard natural laws of evolution and the "survival of the fittest" prevail here to the fullest extent. As these laws place no limit to their own operation, so our political economy, as shaped in the cast-iron mould of statute, does not prescribe any limit to the acquisitions of the money-maker. We are accustomed to rely upon death, the law of divided inheritance, upon competition, over-trading, and commercial failure to restrain or dissipate undue acccumulation. But in these days of steam and electricity these processes move too slowly for popular impatience, nor are corporations affected by the laws governing human life. And so the power of money goes on increasing,

overriding public opinion, overshadowing all departments of government, and holding all classes of individuals in the iron grip of its universal, inevitable, yet degrading and polluting despotism.

For the purpose of formulating the popular desire to do something toward curbing the power of wealth, the statute-books of other States have been burdened with enactments, generally of a superficial and transitory character. Rates of fares and freights have been fixed by law, but no such law has ever been executed. Legislative enactments regulating banking, insurance, and all other moneyed corporations are found in almost every State; yet nowhere, outside of California, has it been found expedient to assert any more radical principle than the right of the State and Federal Governments to regulate corporations. But in our State, though our Solons are yet groping in the dark for the key where with to unlock this most intricate of problems, we find certain maxims engrafted in the new Constitution, and others studiously omitted, which indicate the will of the people on this point-which permit, or rather command, double and treble taxation of capital-lay unheard of responsibilities on the officers of corporations-permit unequal taxation, leaving it in the power of the legislature to discriminate in this matter between persons or interests and positively ordain interference with certain private interests, to an extent that may crush them altogether. While the Constitutional Convention was in session, we narrowly escaped the incorporation into its report of several of the wildest and most impracticable of schemes against capital. And there are members of the present legislature, who, if they could have their own way, would make it impossible for any person to hold more land than would make a farm, or at most a sheep range; would destroy the power of conveyance or devise of more than a certain area; would tax both property and incomes at a percentage increasing with their amounts. The Constitution has made penal any attempt at the diffusion of taxes among the community, by treating them as part of the cost of production. The Workingman's party would treat the millionaire and the corporation as public enemies, deny them freedom of action, ride rough-shod over their rights, as well as the experience gained in their business, and give them to understand that the public interest would be promoted by their total destruction. Consequently, capital has ceased to flow hitherward, and New York is exulting in the access of our money and moneyed men to the crowded exchanges of that metropolis.

If it be asked why California happens to be just now the favored arena of communistic discussion, the answer involves many considerations. Previously to the two years last past, our city was in receipt of the princely income of twenty-four millions of dollars per annum, in dividends from only two mines. The gross revenue from these mines, which exceeded one hundred millions, added to the produce of other mines, and to our regular income from agriculture, commerce, and manufactures, gave an inflated value to all kinds of property, especially to mining stocks. Enormous individual profits from these uncertain sources stimulated building, attracted population, furnished work for all industrious people, filled the savings banks with coin, which loaned some seventy millions of dollars on mortgages in all parts of the State. The whole people—never celebrated for the small economies of living-became wildly extravagant in their expenditures, and completely infatuated with the spirit of speculation. Four stock-boards had all the business they could attend to. The profits, not only of the mines, but of many other of what are generally called more legitimate branches of business, were all ventured in the grand lottery, with the necessary result. How fares it with the stocks to-day?

The dividends have long since ceased. Assessments continue and increase, until now they drain the city of fifteen millions of dollars per annum. The stocks have shrunk to a fraction of their former average value. The multitude have lost enormously. Ten banks have failed or discontinued. Of the few individuals whose successful manipulations once enabled them to monopolize the small fortunes of the many, the majority have found their possessions turn to ashes, like the apples of Sodom. Old mines, once quoted at millions, have disappeared from the list; new ones, in their places, have as yet only the small value that hope confers upon them. And here is one great element of discontent affecting the poorer classes, whose natural unwillingness to blame only their own bad judgment seeks consolation for their losses in blaming somebody else.

Meantime, the industrial classes have suddenly waked up to the fact, long ago patent to thoughful men, that while they were wasting their substance with riotous living, the patient, abstemious, and plodding Chinese were gradually monopolizing all branches of labor by which the poor could live, or in which the career of our own rising generation might receive its first impulse. Yet this evil, wide-spread and firmly rooted as it is, is founded on a Federal treaty with a foreign power, protected by the