"Are you giving them credit for altruism? They have their millions invested here, naturally they crave a reasonable prospect of retaining them--also of increasing them by filling Fairmont, and other projected caravansaries for the rich, with winter tourists from the East; possibly Europe. They not only fear the corporation cormorants--whom they can never reach so long as the Board of Supervisors is controlled by the Boss--the Boss himself and all his devouring horde, but the greatest menace of all: that San Francisco will in time, and before very long, be owned body and soul by the labor-unions. Then, even if they managed to save their wealth, the city would be intolerable for the socially ambitious or even the merely refined." "You are unfair," said Gwynne; "for these men all have enough to pull out and invest elsewhere. They could go to New York and buy a big position, as so many of their predecessors have done. Or to London. Of course no man ever lived that was wholly disinterested, unless he was a fanatic, but it is vastly to the credit of these men that they love their own city, stand by it--determined to make it livable, not only for themselves, but for future generations; instead of moving away and becoming millionaires of leisure." "Oh yes, I don't deny that they have enthusiasm--the remnant, no doubt, of what in their European ancestors was temperament. Americans don't have temperament. Or if we have we are far too self-conscious to show it. In the East it has been quite eradicated. Out here where gambling is still in the blood--and that blood is mixed--where the air is full of electricity, and the very ground under your feet none too certain, we are a little more primitive; we have an excitability that makes strangers find us more like the Latin races of Europe than our relatives beyond the Rockies. And although the set you admire does not drink, nor live the all-night life, it has its own demands for spice and variety, and its own ways of gratifying them. Love of change, love of any sort of a fight, is in the blood of your true Californian--particularly here in San Francisco, where all the great gambling fevers, from the days of '49 to the wild speculations in Virginia City stocks in '76, have raged up and out. Your friends are merely playing a big game. Successive defeats, and the formidable front of the enemy, make it the more stimulating. They have that fanatical love of San Francisco that every one out here has who doesn't hate it, and they find it more exciting to stay here and gamble for big stakes than to watch their wives spend money in New York, and console them for snubs. Another point--they are far more enterprising than the rich men's sons that preceded this generation--or set, rather. They keep on making money, you may have observed. And fashions change. New York Society is no longer the Mecca of the worldly San Franciscan, and it has also become the fashion to invest huge amounts here; in many cases, entire fortunes.