Los Angeles herald., 1890-05-07
WEDNESDAY,. MAY :, 1890.
MYSTERIOUS SILENCE AND
RETROSPECT.


Just now a great movement, at least
on the surface, is being made to get
competing transcontinental railway into
San Francisco. The Examiner, Chronicle,
Alta, Call, Bulletin and Euening Post have
nothing to say about it. An evening
paper, the Daily Report, lays great stress
upon the silence OF the other daily
journals of the Golden Gate and puts an
equivocal construction upon their reti-
cence. 1t has evidently adopted the
sinister maxim, in this case, that silence
is golden.
This does not necessarily follow, but
the fact remains that the daily
press of San Francisco, with the excep-
ton aforesaid, have maintained an unac-
countable indifference as to competi-
ton. On the other hand, the Report
has not always been accepted as the
most patriotic of journals, and it may
just be that it is liable itself to some of
the censorious remarks which it directs
against it's contemporaries. 1t may, in
fact, be running little game of its own,
behind which stands some coterie of ap-
proved guile, and it's own speech may be
silvern, at least.
AS matter of record, the people of
San Francisco have always shown a
strange disregard of their true railway
interests. If that city were to plunge
under the waters of the combined bay
and ocean tomorrow it certainly could
not be alleged it had been sunk by the
weightof its public spirit. Almost any
other city in the United States of half of
its inhabitants and tenth of its wealth
would have been inclined to subscribe
money to help competing road. But
the capitalists of the Golden Gate be-
lieve not in subscribing but in lending
money, and at good rates of usance.
While San Francisco has never made
any real efforts to secure competition by
advances of money to roads in rivalry
with the Southern Pacific railway, there
was time when she did most absurd
thing, against her own interests, merely
to spite the men who had carried the
Central Pacific railway through to COM
pletion. At that time her principal
journals were by no means silent. 1t
was before the era of ''caving down the
bank" newspapers that were hostile to
the railway company. The Central Pa
cifc people wanted Goat island as a
terminus for their transcontinental road.
Immediately a most horrible out
cry was set up, the Call and
Bulletin being the leaders in the shrill
refrain. 1t was probably the most aggra-
waited case of damnable iteration ever
heard of on this coast. Congress, which
had been asked to give the island to the
railway company, was dazed by the
reverberated clamor.
This was a case-away back in 1872
in which the newspapers of San Fran
cisco were not silent-not by several
removes. Nobody would have been in
the least injured if the railway had got
the island, which nobody else wanted,
but if they had got it the city and
county of San Francisco would
have been very much benefited. With
Goat island once in their possession, the
Central Pacific would have put their
depot and other terminal accessories on
it, would probably have moved their
workshops from Sacramento down there,
and the whole would have been in the
city and county of San Francisco, SUBJ
ject to the action of the assessors of that
municipal corporation, instead of being
in the counties of Alameda and Sacra-
mento, where the tax-gatherer of the
Golden Gate cannot reach them
Verify, the ways of San Francisco
newspapers are sometimes past finding
out