SOCIAL CHANGES IN CALIFORNIA. 797 



values, and the development of the Comstock, long prevented the 

 popular recognition of the gravity of the problem. When knowl- 

 edge 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 Cali- 

 fornia 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 Ameri- 

 can 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. 



" Calif ornians," 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 Cali- 

 fornian ; now they want a foreign trade-mark on everything." 



During the period that I have called the transition era, extend- 

 ing over eight or ten years after 1870, political standards in Cali- 

 fornia 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 re- 

 sisted temptation. An almost unbroken line of demagogues, num- 

 bered 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 lower- 

 ing of the remarkably advantageous economic conditions of a 

 quarter of a century ago appears to have thrown many unthink- 

 ing voters into closer relations with " the bosses/' and so has made 

 honest politics a more difficult business. It is the most deplora- 

 ble result of that sudden outbreak of discontent called Kearney- 



