Los Angeles daily herald., 1884-11-05
A GIsring Incqunlity-A New
state Inevitable.

Now that the travail and hurly
burly OF the Presidential election are
done with, tits right that n newspaper
published in Los Angeles should call
attention TO glaring inequality Of
which this end of the State has been
for years the victim. II is only by
the recent apportionment that the
exceptional growth of Southern Cali
fornia has been recognized in any de-
gree, and that only partially. In
fact, no data was accessible to the
late Legislature which would enable
il TO give us more than two Senators
and three Assemblymen, because its
allotment was founded upon the vote
at the gubcrnatorial election of 1882.
Since that date an astonishing number
of new comers have become eligible
TO vote, as the returns printed else
where will show. We are greatly
mistaken or Los Angeles county will
either surpass or come very near
Alameda county in the total vote cast
this year; and yet the county by the
Bay has three Senators and six As
semblymen, having total represent
alton in the legislature of nine mem
bers to our five.
This is n gross and grievous dis
elimination but it does not tell the
whole story, by any means, Though
first settled, the Southern portion of
California has only begun to be under
stood of very late years 1t required
a peculiar intelligence and repeated
experiments in new fields of agricult-
ure and horticulture to develop the
latent but tremendous possibilities of
this section. Since we have learned
to understand its advantages the
HERALD has been steadily of the
opinion that most of the growth which
will characterize the State for the
next ten years will be recorded south
of Point Conception, and unquestion-
ably the most marked form of this
phenomenal progress will be register
ed in Los Angeles county We firmly
believe that, by the time the census
of 1890 is taken, there will be at least
two hundred thousand people set
tied in the three million three
hundred thousand acres which
compose the ample domain OF Los
Angeles county. The ratio OF growth
in population and wealth of the south
ern portion of the State will be infn-
itely greater than that which will be
witnessed in the northern and central
counties; and yet We will still, in Los
Angeles county, be restricted to our
pitiful two Senators and three Assem-
blymen; as, under the present sys-
TEN, no method has been provided
for adjusting the representation to the
actual state of the population. This
has undoubtedly been less oversight
than design, as the northern and CEN
raj counties are very tenacious of
their control of the legislation of the
State. As consequence, a great,
progressive and peculiar section,
which requires much legislation of a
kind of which the northern and CEN
trail counties know nothing and care
less, will find itself sitting at Sacra-
mento like bound boy at a husking.
1t requires no very great degree
of intelligence to realize the in
evitable result. When Los Angeles
county, for instance, has five times
the population of Sacramento, as it
soon will have, it will not care to sub
init to such an intolerable wrong.
The solution of the difficulty un-
questionably lies in the creation of
new State, to be called Los Angeles
or South California. All the proba-
bilities point to the early evolution of
the new Commonwealth. Asagacious
California Legislature could have
postponed the inevitable day by
more flexible system OF adjusting
representation. II taxation without
representation is robbery, taxation
with only partial representation is
robbery only lesser in degree. The
tremendous strides in population
which the election returns OF yester-
day show to have been made in Los
Angeles during the past two years
have been made in lesser degree but
still in splendid volume in all the
Southern counties They, like our
selves, will resent the injustice; and,
out of this protest, will shortly grow
united action in favor OF the crea-
tion of the new State. As the rotten
borough State OF Nevada dwindlcs in
population and wealth day by dav,
the region known as Southern Cali
fornia is advancing in both with i'm.