Note 73 — Chapter IV · San Francisco After the Fire.
Reading edition
After Ruef’s capture of the Union Square meeting, Rev. P. C. Macfarlane, pastor of the First Christian Church at Alameda, said in a sermon (October 21, 1906) of the San Francisco situation:
“Let a few resolute, clean-handed business men of San Francisco who are not cowards, who are not quitters or grafters, get together and make a purse of twenty, fifty or a hundred thousand dollars, then employ the ablest attorney to be had and set quietly to work to find the graft and punish the grafters. They could make chapel exercises on Sunday afternoon in San Quentin look like a political rally in San Francisco inside of two years.
“Thus Eugene E. Schmitz stands before the world as a man who tried to reform and could not. He is a moral inebriate. He is a welcher. He is a wanderer on the face of the globe, a man without country, expatriated by his own cowardice. This is Dr. Jekyll.
“But there are some who see in Schmitz Mr. Hyde. These do not give the Mayor credit for even a spasm of virtue and say that the great work of the morning of April 18 was done by General Funston and prominent citizens of their own volition. These people say that he has now gone from San Francisco, taking with him vast sums of money gained through the granting of the trolley franchise, plotted even while the embers smoldered, and that he will never return.
“The United Railroads is universally believed to have acquired its trolley franchises by corrupt means. It is said that prominent merchants will crane and crook and bow and scrape to get a nod of recognition from Abe Ruef. Ruef has used the advantages given him by the state of affairs to corrupt the greatest city in California. Ruef owns the Board of Supervisors. The Police Commissioners belong to him. The saloon-keeper who wants a license, a corporation that wants a favor from the Board of Supervisors, has only to retain Ruef as an attorney at a fee sufficiently large.”
Dr. Macfarlane gave expression to what many thoughtful men were thinking, but of which few with interests at San Francisco dared to admit openly.