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[Item recovered from Reese River Reveille, January 12, 1866, p. 3]
HER "GAIT"
It is a shame that the town and the State will not give a single block to a
Government that is constantly spending money upon them. Now I hate to tell such
a plain truth, but I must -- the bulk of San Francisco's liberality seems sometimes
actuated by a love of applause. She don't always take kindly to a good deed
for a good deed's sake, but pat her on the head, and flatter her, and say bully,
bully, bully, is the great Metropolis of the Pacific, and she will break her
neck trying to accomplish that good deed. You get old Dr. Bellows to glorify
her princely liberality in ten telegraphic sentences, at forty cents a word,
and down they come with $20,000 for the Sanitary Fund! They always respond when
"Glory" calls, but they are sometimes slow to respond when they are
not going to be applauded. They yell "loyalty, loyalty, loyalty" till
they are in a fever of noble, patriotic enthusiasm, and then turn around and
pull the Government's nose when she offers them the greenback that saved the
nation's life. They howl "nigger, nigger, nigger -- nigger equality, nigger
soldier, nigger suffrage, noble nigger brother" -- but they wouldn't walk
in procession with the admired nigger last Fourth of July. They glorify themselves,
and their soil, and their mines, and their large trees and waterfalls, and their
fine metropolis, and their patriotism and munificence, and their mountains and
rivers, and their matchless climate -- and then get up and skurry home to the
States as soon as they can borrow money enough to go in the first cabin, so
as to sign the card immortalizing the captain for attending to his business
and being "efficient, urbane and accommodating." Now, do you know
the lesson this rather plain statement of the case teaches? It teaches that
the only way to gouge Union Square out of these glory-loving Supervisors is
to promise them that they shall be published and praised and flattered all over
the world, and no mention made of their State being an expensive luxury to the
Government. Let us commence idolizing them at once, else we may not get the
new Mint in ten years, and the constantly increasing bullion returns of the
coast will make it an utter impossibility for the present little Mint to do
the work that will be required of it.
[Reprinted in American Literary Realism, Vol. 47, No. 1, Fall 2014, p. 91-92.]
