its editorial management is timorous to a ridiculous degree. The "Chronicle," whose principal proprietor recently lost his life in a tragedy growing out of these occurrences, is best described as a "live paper" of the most vigorous and unscrupulous kind. As though a tacit partnership had been formed, Kearney began to call upon workingmen to stop the "Call" and take the "Chronicle," while the "Chronicle" on its part advertised the meetings in the highest style of the art, giving Kearney the greatest prominence and detailing its best reporters to manufacture and dress up his speeches. Thus advertised, the meetings began to draw.
California Street Hill is crowned by the palaces of the railroad nabobs—men who a few years ago were selling coal-oil or retailing dry goods, but who now count their wealth by the scores of millions. To complete the block which one of these had selected for his palace, an undertaker's homestead was necessary. The undertaker wanted more than the nabob was willing to give, and the latter cut short the negotiation by inclosing the undertaker's house on three sides with an immense board fence, probably the highest on the Pacific coast, if not in the world. This veritable coffin, which shuts out view and sun from the undertaker's little home, and which the common law, now abrogated in California by the code, would not have permitted, is one of the most striking features of the Hill.
When, with the assistance of the "Chronicle," the meetings had begun to draw crowds, largely composed of unemployed men, who after the harvest begin to collect in San Francisco, and of a class that of late years has become numerous, the professional beggars or strikers, a meeting was called for the top of California Street Hill, where the nabobs were regaled by the cheers of a surging crowd, when it was proposed by one of the speakers—a pamphleteer and newspaper writer well known in California for many years, but who neither before nor since took any other part in the agitation—to celebrate Thanksgiving by pulling down the big fence, if not removed by that time. This was too much: the railroad magnates were frightened—even the "Chronicle" demanded the arrest of the agitators; a sudden energy was infused into the authorities, and they, with the proposer of the fence-destruction, were arrested on charges of riot.
That these arrests were ill advised the sequel proves. And it is to be remarked that in all Kearney's wild declamation there has been no direct incitement to violence. He has talked about wading through blood, hanging official thieves, burning the Chinese quarter, and generally "raising Cain," but it has always been with an "if." He has never come any nearer to actually proposing any of these things than Daniel O'Connell did to proposing armed resistance to the English Government. Nor yet is it easy to point to anything which Kearney has said that is really more violent or incendiary than things said before with impunity. It was not Dennis Kearney, but a Republican
