Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1882-11-02
Why rsERB is NO EsrHus1Asn

State. The people do not attend the meet
ings in considerable numbers. There has
not been really large meeting since the
opening of the campaign. Those who do
attend listen to the speeches silently. mani
Testing no approval of what is said, and
appearing rather to regard the addresses
as curious psychological studies than as ar.
guments in which they are interested.
Everyone who is concerned in politics
agrees that there never before was so
thoroughly dull and apathetic canvass.
OF course the partisan organs have been
making desperate efforts to create the i'm
preston that the meetings were more
lively than they really have been, but it is
thoroughly understood that all such repre-.
sensations are untrue, and that the pre-
tense of growing interest on behalf of
Estee is pure fiction. And yet this condi.
ton of things is precisely what ought to
have been expected on any supposition save
the untenable one that the people are
hopeless fools. The politicians have from
the outset exhibited stupidity and an ig-
norance of human nature which prove
their Incompetence even for the business
they have studied professionally. In the
first place they started upen false premises.
They assumed that there was strong and
universal anti-railroad sentiment in the
State. They took this for granted. They had
no evidence for it but the malignant rawlings
of one or two blackmail newspapers like
the Chronicle. In the next place they
imagined that the people were SO simple as
not to perceive that even if there did exist
a need for railroad legislation, it never
could be secured through the methods pro-
posed.
But the people have better memories
than the politicians. They have not for
gotten the history of the railroad question
in this State. They have not forgotten how
it has been used for ten years by dema-
gogues as a patent method of getting
office; how each new gang of impostors
has proposed some more drastic system of
railroad regulation than the last how
every one of these schemes has broken
down upon analysis through the sheer
weight of its own imbecility and inequity !;
how the greed of the demagogues has
constantly impelled them to advance new
projects, before the old ones had been
tested; how the same greed has driven
them to denounce as corrupt every tribunal
which punctured their ill-considered pro.
posals how they have grown from bad to
worse, every year becoming less rational
and more rabid, yet every year getting
further away from their pretended aim.
The people remember how the anti-rail.
road movement began with the urging of
impracticable regulative laws in the State
Legislature how, when examination
showed these laws to be impracticable, the
demagogues denounced the Legislature as
corrupt; how, to mend matters, the new
Constitution was framed how the same
demagogues, still hopelessly perverse and
stupid, rendered the whole revenue system
abortive in trying to create unlawful dis
ordinations against the railroads; how
they formed a Railroad Commission which
was TO take the railroad question out of
politics; how, as soon as the Commission
was appointed, they began to find fault
with it because it did not ignore all ju-
dicial process and all the laws of evidence,
and act blindly how, finally, the same mis-
chievous class dug up the railroad question,
and once more undertook to make it the
controlling issue, simply because they
could not find any topics to go to the PEG.
pie upon.
The people have forgotten none of these
things, and they perceive that if they do
not put stop to the rampant demagogism
of the time, the worst and most CORFU pt
class of politicians will continue to usurp
party management, and will force this rail-
road question into politics for the next
twenty years, never settling it, never
bringing it any nearer settlement, but
continually demanding more communistic
laws, and thus keeping the State in hot
water, driving out capital and enterprise,
and demorslizing politics generally and
hopelessly. For they cannot stop, even if
they wished to do so. Witness this cam.
paign. The Democrats started with an
anti.railroad platform. Thereupon the
Republicans must have a more radical
platform in the same line. And when the
next election comes around the dema.
gogues will, If the people give them any
encouragement, propose still wilder meas
ures, and each party will try to surpass the
other. In the very nature of things there
can be no natural termination to this kind
of rivalry. But the people have had an
experience which is worth great deal to
them. They know by this time that rant.
ing demagogues are not to be trusted, and
that the more they rant the more they are
to be suspected. That there is not par.
ticle of conviction on either side in the
present canvass is notorious. Iii mere
rivalry in imposture. Both sides are daily
insulting the people by counting upon
their stupidity, and since the people are
not stupid it is perfectly easy to under
stand why there is no enthusiasm in the
campaign.
The public behavior indeed bodies i'll to
the most shameless of the demagogues.
and they realize this. 1t is to be regretted
that popular contempt and apprehension
cannot be visited upon all the brszsn i'm.
posters who have been masquerading
through the State on false issues, but since
that is not possible voters must make mn
their minds to do the next best thing
which is to administer crushing rebuke
to the most impudent and unprincipled
of the ofice-seeking gang. There ia no
other way to check the demagogism which
has cursed California so long, and which
has coat the State so many millions from
first to last. For this is the real cause of
whatever backwardness is observable.
No State in the Union would be more pros.
porous than this If it could once for all get
rid of its demagogues. They have been to
it worse than earthquakes, worse than
droughts, worse than foods, worse than