The record-union., 1896-05-31
DEMOCRATIC POLITICS
AND THE
WOMAN SUFFRAGISTS.
Arthur McEwen's Pointed Letter
Lack Of Life in San Francisco.


wife says. too, it seems to me-says she:
We can't all be preachers and lawyers
and public speakers and celebrated
characters, but most Of us If we try hard
can make good wives to good men who
work to support us, and these suffra-
gists with their everlasting cry that
men are expressing us, and that all we
need to make us happy is the ballot,
spread discomfort. The average woman
hasn't any more brains than she needs
to take care of her house and babies,
and, being human, she has her cares
and worries, and finds her life small be-
cause she is. So she gets it into her head
that, in some vague way, she's wronged
that she'd have been somebody some
how If it wasn't for she doesn't know
what. That's the harm these platform
women are doing. You don't hear them
talking of girls duty to their parents
and wives duty to their husbands, but
all about rights, rights, rights-as if
voting would make a smart woman out
OF stupid one in magical way. any
more than it makes wise man out of a
fool. These suffra gists are unsettling
little women's minds and making them
unhappy. They're spreading self CON
sclousness, inflaming vanity and substi-
tuting all sorts of foggy and impossible
longings for what should be every SEN
sible woman's honest ambition-which
is to get some decent fellow to fall in
love with her and marry her. That's
what my wife says, and I'm with her.
Besides, opposition to woman suffrage
means that we control the saloon vote
for the Democracy"
The opening of the Emporium in the
Parrott building on Market street.-The
handsomest structure in the city-il-
lustrates again San Francisco's inability
to understand itself This new place is
not the largest multi-charge store in
the world, burt in point of costliness,
convenlences, elaborateness, the Bon
Marche or the Magasin du Louvre can't
hold a candle to it. 1t is an establish
ment suited to Paris or London, for it
requires great city for its support,
and nobody outside of San Francisco
thinks of San Francisco as a great CITY.
Yet, though it grows scarcely at all
now, and has lost its wholesale trade.
and is frightened instead of eIated at
the prospect of an increasing commerce
with Japan, and has become nearly all
together a retail town that lives on its
own people mostly, San Francisco fam
cies itself another Chicago or New
York, inferior, for the time being. only
In size. When the Mills building went
up on Montgomery street and the
Crocker building on Market, the offices
for many blocks around were emptied
OF their tenants and no new ones have
appeared to take their places. In con-
sequence, rents all about these big. new
buildings have gone down, and the
value Of property deprecated greatly.
similarly, storekeepers throughout the
city will suffer from the Emporium.
You hear the argument gravely made
by apparently intelligent men, that
these large structures and vast business
establishments are evils, precisely as
workingmen cannot see the beneficence
Of the substitution Of machines for hand
labor. So they are an evil in a town at
once so lethargic and self-satisfied as
San Francisco, which has a peculiar
| talent for remaining stationary, and
whose business men have neither the
mind nor the energy to be self-helpful
and enterprising. If the city were
DUllUnR,
every experiment like the colossal EN-
| por1um, would be a stimulating i'm
provement instead Of a sapping calam-
| ity.
When a building becomes empty here
it is apt to stay empty, and when a
neighborhood loses by a movement of
population in another direction it falls
into decay and gets to be as dead and
quiet as a cemetery. We are showing
| our public spirit just now, not by try
| ing to extend trade or by giving our
minds to the development of the inte-
riOr, but by getting up carnival,
which promises to be a cross between
a Southern California flower show and
an old-fashioned Fourth of July The
carnival is well enough, no doubt;
| whatever contributes fun to life and
| brings in nickels from the country to
the broad-minded and free-handed me-
| tropolis deserves q San Franciscan 3
| approval. But the carnival prepara-
| tions irresistibly recall the Half-Mil-
| lion Club. What has become of that
! aggregation of brass-banding patriots,
/ every one of them a Shortridge in elo-
| quence, who We're to give us half a
million inhabitants in no time? I don t
know-gone glimmering with the noble
boulevard to San Jose on which the
| Call" afflicted with homesickness and
notions of doing things wholly unmet-
ropol1tan, had set its rural heart The
men who put up Mills and Crocker
/ buildings and open Emporiums here are
to be admired for their courage. They
erect monuments to their isolated de-
{ IL
ing they deserve-the backing of a
vigorous, businesslike and homoge-
neous community.
But If San Francisco isn't commercial,
and therefore not fitted to render happy
the modern, money-making Ameri
can, it is a good place, comfortable
place, for the unmercantile-the best
III the United States. For it is lazy
and quiet and unharasssng and the
absence of public spirit breeds blessed
disposition in the individual to mind his
own business and accord that high
privilege Of a serene civilization to
others. / don't think the Christian En-
deavorers, if they hold their next an
nual international conference here, as
/ proposed. Will like the spirit OF San
( Francisco, which is sinfully good-hu-
mored and cheerfully Indifferent.
/ 1 have never seen the city show so
little interest in an opening Presidential
campaign. This is owing in part to the
/ fact that the newspapers here avoid Of
fense by abstaining from the discussion
( of matters about which there is a diff
/ ference Of opinion among their valued
/ subscribers. The Examiner" for ex
/ ample, which has been trying for a
month to get Major Mckinley TO give