But now, at the very sources, the full flood of the somewhat turbid
tide of prosperity was beginning to fail. The ebb had not yet reached
the civic consciousness. It would have required a philosopher, and a
detached philosopher at that, to have connected cause and effect, to
have forecast the inevitable trend of events. If there were any
philosophers they were not detached! Nobody had discovered the simple
truth that extravagance, graft, waste, cost money; and that the money
must come from somewhere. Realization on its property and taxes were
the twin sources of the city's revenues. The property was now about all
sold or swindled away. Remained the taxes. And it is a self-evident
truth that people will pay high taxes cheerfully only so long as they
themselves are making plenty of money easily.
Up to this period such had been the case. Prices had been high, wages
had been high, opportunities had been many. Enormous profits had been
the rule. Everybody had invariably made money. These conditions upset
the mental balance of the shipping merchants back East. A madness
seemed to obsess them for sending goods to California. The mere rumour
of a want or a lack was answered by immense shipments of that
particular commodity. The first cargo to arrive supplied the want; all
the rest simply broke the market. It was a gamble as to who should get
there first. The immediate and picturesque consequence was a fleet of
beautiful clipper ships, built like racing yachts, with long clean
lines and snowy sails. They made extraordinarily fast voyages, and they
promptly condemned to death the old-fashioned, slow freight carriers.
Indeed, four-hundred odd of these actually rotted at anchor in the bay;
it had not paid to move them! Some of these clippers gained vast
reputations: the _Flying Cloud_, the _White Squall_, the _Typhoon_, the
_Trade Wind_. The markets were continually in a state of glut with
goods sold at auction. This condition tightened the money market, which
in turn reacted on other branches of industry. Again, the great fires
of '49-'53 resulted in the erection of too many fireproof buildings.
Storage was needed, and rentals were high, so everybody plunged on
storehouses. By '54 many hundreds of them stood vacant, representing
loss. At that period the first abundance of the placers began to fall
off.
Agriculture was beginning to be undertaken seriously; and while this
would be an ultimate source of wealth, its immediate effect was to
diminish the demand for imported foodstuffs--another blow to a purely
mercantile city.
All this made for excitement, some immediate gain, but a sure ultimate
loss. Markets fluctuated wildly. A ship in sight threw operators into a
fever. No one knew what she might be carrying, or how she would, affect
prices. It was, therefore, positively unsafe to keep-many goods is
stock. Quick, immediate sales were the rule. And failures were many.
Now in these middle fifties the pinch was beginning at last to itself
felt. Everybody was a little vague about it all, and nobody had gone so
far as to formulate his dissatisfactions or his remedies. The tangible
result was the formation of two as yet inchoate elements, representing
the extremes of ideas and of interests.
The first of these elements--that can with equal justice be called the
parasitic or the middleman class--consisted in itself of several sorts
of people. The nucleus was a small, intellectually honest set of men
who believed, in the law _per se_, in the sacredness of formal
institutions in the constitution, and in the subservience of the
individual to the institution. This was temperamental. Behind them were
many much larger groups of those needed either the interpretation or
the protection of the law for their private interests. These were of
all sorts from honest literal-minded dealers, through shady contractors
and operators, down to grafters and the very lowest type of strong-arm
bullies. The tone and respectability came from the first, the practical
results from the second. The first class had a genuine intellectual
contempt for men whose minds could not see--or at least would not
accept--the same subtleties that it did. Its members were fond of such
phrases as the "lawless mob," or the "subversion of time-honoured
institutions." This small, subjectively honest, conservative, specially
trained element must not be forgotten in the final estimate of what
later came to be known as the "Law and Order" party.
On the other hand was first of all an equally small nucleus of thinking
men whose respect for the law, merely as law, was not so profound; men
who were, reluctantly, willing to admit that when law completely broke
down in encompassing justice, individualism was justified in stepping
in. Behind them was a vast body of more or less unthinking men who
recognized the indubitable facts that the law had become a farce, that
justice had degenerated to tricks, and who were, therefore,
instinctively against law, lawyers, and everybody who had anything to
do with them.
Strangely enough this made for lawlessness on both sides. Those who
believed in "law and order" committed crime or misdemeanour or mere
injustice, sure of escape through some technicality. Those who
distrusted courts administered justice illegally with their own hands!
Nor was this merely in theory. San Francisco at that time was
undoubtedly the most corrupt and lawless city in the world. Street
shootings, duels, robberies, ballot-box stuffing, bribery, all the
crimes traceable to a supine police and venal or technical courts were
actually so commonplace as to command but two or three lines in the
daily papers. Justice was completely smothered under technicalities and
delays.
The situation would have been intolerable to any people less busy than
the people of that time. For political corruption in a vigorous body
politic is not, as pessimists would have us believer an indication of
incipient decay, but only an indication that a busy people are willing
to pay that price to be left alone, to be relieved of the
administration of their public affairs, When they get less busy, or the
price in corruption becomes too high, then they refuse to pay. The
price Francisco was paying becoming very high, not only in money, but
in other and spiritual things. She could still afford to pay it; but at
the least pressure she would no longer afford it. Then she would act.