“How can he be if he is cognizant of the means employed by Huntington to defeat all legislation in favor of the Texas Pacific?” observed Mr. Holman.
“Yes, I fear now the Governor gives his sanction to Huntington's work. I never believed it before. I am disappointed in the Governor as much as in our fruitless errand,” the Don said.
“How irksome and distasteful it is for him to hear about ‘the rights of others.’ He almost takes it as an insult that any one but himself and associates should have rights; and he seems to lose all patience at the mention of the distress they have brought upon the people of San Diego and the financial ruin that their rapacity and heartless conduct will cause the Southern people,” said Mr. Holman. “Did you notice how he frowned at the allusion to the fact that the Central Pacific was built with Government money? The mere mention irritates his nerves.”
“Does he suppose we don't know that they had no money, and that it was with capital given as absolute gifts, or loaned to them on the guarantee of the Government, that they built and are building their roads?” said Mr. Mechlin. “I never saw such complete subversion of the laws of reasoning as these men exhibit. Good luck has made them think that to genius they owe success. Thus their moral blindness makes them take as an insulting want of proper deference any allusion to those rights of others which, in their feverish greed, they trample. For this reason they hate San Diego, because San Diego is a living proof of their wrong-doing; a monument reminding California of their deadly egotism, of the injury done by unscrupulous men to their fellow-men. Hence, my friends, I say that San Diego must have no hopes while those men live.”
“I am afraid you are right, and as I have invested in San Diego all I have in the world, I see no hope; nothing but hard-featured poverty staring me in the face,” said Mr. Holman, sadly.
“If it were owing to natural laws of the necessities of things that San Diego is thus crippled, our fate would seem to me less hard to bear,” said Don Mariano; “but to know that the necessities of commerce, the inevitable increase of the world's population, the development of our State, all, all demand that Southern California be not sacrificed, and yet it is, and our appeals to Congress are of no avail! All this adds bitterness to our disappointment. Yes, it is bitter to be reduced to want, only because a few men, without any merit, without any claims upon the nation's gratitude, desire more millions.”
Thus the disheartened friends discoursed, fully realizing their terrible proximity to that financial disaster which was sure to overtake them. In the generosity and kindness of their hearts, they felt added regret, thinking of so many others who, in San Diego, were in the same position of impending ruin; so many good, worthy people, who certainly did not deserve to be thus pitilessly sacrificed; so many who yet clung to the hopes of '72, when all rushed to buy city lots; so many out of whose hopes three years of disappointment had not quenched all life. The failure of Jay Cook in the fall of '73 had made the financial heart of America shrink with discouragement and alarm, but San Diego did not realize how much her own fate was involved in that sad catastrophe, and continued her gay building of proud castles in the air and humble little cottages on the earth—very close to the earth, but covered with fragrant flowers, with roses, honeysuckles and fuchsias. These little one-story wooden cottages were intended for temporary dwellings only. By and by the roomy stone or brick mansions would be erected, when the Texas Pacific Railroad—the highway of traffic across the continent—should bring through San Diego the commerce between Asia and the Atlantic seaboard, between China and Europe. San Diego lived her short hour of hope and prosperity, and smiled and went to sleep on the brink of her own grave, the grave that Mr. C. P. Huntington had already begun to excavate, to dig as he stealthily went about the halls of our National Capitol “offering bribes.” But such “foul work” was then only surmised and scarcely believed. It was reserved for Mr. Huntington himself to furnish proof that this was the fact. His letters were not published until years after, but the world has them now, and the monopoly, with all its power, cannot gainsay them.
The three friends were yet discussing this painful topic of their pilgrimage, when Mr. Mechlin observed that Don Mariano was looking very pale, and asked if he felt ill.
“Yes,” Don Mariano replied; “I feel very cold. I feel as if I was frozen through and through. When we were at the Governor's office I felt very warm, and when we came out my clothing was saturated with perspiration. Now I feel as if I had been steeped in ice.”
“This won't do. You must change your clothes at once,” said Mr. Mechlin.