SACRAMENTO TO HER SISTER COUNTIES. [Part 1.]
Sacramento Daily Union, 5 June 1873 .
The address of the Independent Taxpayers’ Committee, after setting forth with remarkable brevity the causes which have made the new local political party necessary and the issue between the people of this county and the railway monopoly, points to the “election of members of the next Legislature who will command the confidence of the whole people and be free from the control of rings and corrupt combinations,” as one of the chief objects of the movement, and concludes with a request that the independent taxpayers “will not attend the party primaries to be held on the 7th of June.” The 7th of June primaries ought to be left exclusively to the Central Pacific Railway managers and their friends. They are in no sense intended to reflect the will of the Republican or any other party, and have been planned so as to insult and defy the wishes of the people and taxpayers. Whoever votes at them will have to give a pledge which will exclude him from voting at the primaries ordered by the Taxpayers’ Committee for the 21st of June, when it is expected that all men who favor the reforms sought in this movement will, without respect to their party professions and affiliations in the past, come out and vote.
The sudden development of this movement here has taken many by surprise, and probably calls for an explanation. After it became clear that the people could not obtain justice from the railroadized committee, this plan was matured —as all plans must be— in a few minds at first, and through all its stages was conducted quietly until it was ripe and ready for presentation to the public. The reasons for this will readily be understood. It is one of the misfortunes of our local politics that the most active elements are generally those most unfriendly to the taxpayers and honest government. An initial movement in the shape of a public meeting would have called out this element in full force, while the taxpayers themselves would (as usual) have stayed away, from indifference or a fear of commotion — and so it would have failed in the very start. Proceeding in the quiet, determined, deliberative way they did, this danger was avoided and the whole plan was matured before its enemies could take steps to check or overthrow it, or circumvent it by corrupt influences. It has been said that this movement will set a bad example for other counties in the disintegration of party organization. Even if true, this is not a valid objection to it.
The fight this year is not a State, but a county and district fight. Each county and each senatorial district has its own affairs to look after, and particularly its own one affair of paramount importance— that its voters shall be free to choose the best and most popular men to legislative office, against the influences that are being exerted by the railway monopoly to convert the Legislature to its own uses and elect their protege, George C. Gorham, to the United States Senate. Sacramento county recognizes this as her situation, and takes these steps to shape politics here in the interest of the people and taxpayers. She does not dictate to any other county what to do in the premises, and, least of all, has this movement any purpose of trenching upon matters wholly the province of national partisan politics. Nevertheless, conscious of the justice and good policy of what they have done after mature deliberation and long endurance of wrongs from the common enemy, the taxpayers of Sacramento send greeting to their brethren in like situation wherever they may reside in this State, and respectfully suggest that where the circumstances are the same as we find them here, the same course is equally consistent with justice and sound policy, it is foreign to the whole spirit of American institutions that a system of county committees, for the greater part composed of ignorant, selfish, corrupt men, should control the nominations and virtually dictate the members of the Legislature. This is the worst of the modern usurpation that are bringing free government in the United States into discredit at home and contempt abroad.
If it is not brought to a sudden end it will ruin the republic, and cause the substitution of government by an incorporate oligarchy, working through the purchased agency of vile demagogues, for ” government of the people, by the people and for the people.” Wherever a county committee in this State this year sets itself against the plain will of the people in the manner of holding primary elections, as was done here, and for the manifest interest of the monopoly now seeking to possess itself of the Legislature, we hope the taxpayers— the common people— will imitate the example set them by the Independent Taxpayers’ Party of Sacramento ; appeal from the action of the committee to the source of all political power— the people themselves and kick the recreant committee and its advisers and abettors out of doors.
If they want a Central Pacific Railroad party let them have it, but let it be known that this is their party, and place the honest voters in a situation to treat it according to its merits, separated from those of all other parties. The people of this county are determined that this year the monopoly shall not be permitted to fall the legislature with its creatures in the name and by the borrowed or stolen strength of other political parties. If they elect a Representative or Senator here they must do it with their own votes and upon the plain understanding that the candidate is for them.