448 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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 Sena- 

 tor and nominated no freeholders. For a party without national affili- 

 ations or definite aims must die with its first success, and this is pecu- 

 liarly 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 improve- 

 ment ; disintegration was fast showing itself in the clubs, and Kear- 

 ney 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 accom- 

 plish all I intend if it makes the general facts and course of this agi- 

 tation 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 ma- 

 chine 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 develop- 

 ment 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 Caesar " of whom we hear so much, 

 but of the real Ca?sar whom we may one day evoke ; the working- 

 man's movement has been essentially nothing more than an ordinary 



