In short, I am unable to see, in the conditions from which this agitation sprang, anything really peculiar to California. I can not regard the anti-Chinese sentiment as really peculiar, because it must soon arise in the East should Chinese immigration continue; and because, in the connection in which we are considering it, its nature and effects do not materially differ from those which elsewhere are aroused by other causes. The main fact which underlies all this agitation is popular discontent; and, where there is popular discontent, if there is not one Jonah, another will be found. Thus, over and over again, popular discontent has fixed upon the Jews, and among ourselves there is a large class who make the "ignorant foreigner" the same sort of a scapegoat for all political demoralization and corruption.
There has been in California growing social and political discontent, but the main causes of this do not materially differ from those which elsewhere exist. Some of the factors of discontent may have attained greater development in California than in older sections, but I am inclined to think this is merely because in the newer States general tendencies are quicker seen. For instance, the concentration of the whole railroad system in the hands of one close corporation is remarkable in California, but there is clearly a general tendency to such concentration, which is year by year steadily uniting railroad management all over the country.
The "grand culture" of machine-worked fields, which calls for large gangs of men at certain seasons, setting them adrift when the crop is gathered, and which is so largely instrumental in filling San Francisco every winter with unemployed men, is certainly the form to which American agriculture generally tends, and is developing in the new Northwest even more rapidly than in California.
Nor yet am I sure that the characteristics of the press, to which San Franciscans largely attribute this agitation, are not characteristics to which the newspaper press generally tends. Certain it is that the development of the newspaper is in a direction which makes it less and less the exponent of ideas and advocate of principles, and more and more a machine for money-making.
There is, however, a peculiar local factor which I am persuaded has not been without importance. This is an intangible thing a mere memory. But such intangible things are often most potent. Just as the memory of previous revolutions has disposed the discontented Parisian to think of barricades and the march to the Hôtel de Ville, so has the memory of the Vigilance Committee accustomed San Franciscans to think of extra-legal associations and methods as the last but sovereign resort. These ideas have been current among a different class from that which mans the Paris barricades. The Vigilance Committee of 1856, as most of the other California Vigilance Committees, was organized and led by the mercantile class, and in that class its memories have survived. The wild talk of the "sand-lot"
