d
petitions passed and presented to the Legislature of Sacramento. We had
friends to offer them and foes to move they be thrown out the window. It
is ever thus, "that men go to fierce extremes rather than rest upon the
quiet flow of truths that soften hatred and temper strife." There was
that unknown quantity, present in all legislative bodies, composed of
good "little men" without courage of conviction, others of the Dickens'
"devilish sly" type, who put out their plant-like tendrils for support;
others "who bent the pliant servile knee that thrift may follow
fawning"--all these the make-weight of a necessary constituent in
representative government conservatism. The conservative majority laid
our petition on the table, most likely with the tacit understanding that
it was to be "taken up" by the janitor, and as such action on his part
is not matter for record, we will in this happier day with "charity to
all," over this episode on memory's leaf, simply wrote "lost or stolen."

Among the occasions continually occurring demanding protests against
injustice was the imposition of the "poll tax." It was demanded of our
firm, and we refused to pay. A sufficient quantity of our goods to pay
tax and costs were levied upon, and published for sale, and on what
account.

I wrote with a fervor as cool as the circumstances would permit, and
published a card from a disfranchised oath-denied standpoint, closing
with the avowal that the great State of California might annually
confiscate our goods, but we would never pay the voters tax. The card
attracted attention, the injustice seemed glaring, the goods were
offered. We learned that we had several friends at the sale, one in
particular a Southern man. Now there was this peculiarity about the
Southern white man, he would work a Negro for fifty years for his
victuals and clothes, and shoot a white man for cheating the same Negro,
as he considered the latter the height of meanness. This friend quietly
and persistently moved through the crowd, telling them why our goods
were there, and advising to give them a "terrible letting alone." The
auctioneer stated on what account they were there, to be sold, asked for
bidders, winked his eye and said "no bidders." Our goods were sent back
to our store. This law, in the words of a distinguished Statesman, was
then allowed to relapse "into innocuous desuetude." No further attempts
to enforce it upon colored men were made.

[Illustration: BISHO