Another meeting, held in the Metropolitan Temple, in San Francisco, on June 19, 1894, called on the state conventions of both parties to introduce into their platform resolutions against the funding of the debt of the Central Pacific Railroad Company to the United States at the rate of 2 per cent per annum for one hundred years, at a rate of 4 per cent per annum for fifty years, or at any other percentage, or during any other period. Under the leadership of the eccentric Adolph Sutro, this meeting adopted an arraignment of the Southern Pacific which was almost inarticulate in its denunciation. It was charged that: This monopoly has spread a black cloud over the surface of the State. It has manœuvred through a large number of corporations, of which the Southern Pacific Company of Kentucky is now the center. It has seduced and drawn into its service many prominent men, whose Americanism and integrity were not equal to their brains. It has antagonized the people, minimized immigration, choked enterprise, and, in this unrelenting attack, has used the supposed representatives of the people in each department of the government, Municipal, State, and National. It has controlled legislation, executive action and the administration of justice. It has discriminated in freights and fares and, at every station on its many thousands of miles of railroad, maintained a Custom House of its own. This was followed on June 29 by a telegram, signed by Sutro and addressed to Grover Cleveland, advising the President that history would record him as the greatest benefactor of the American people if he would recommend the foreclosure of the mortgages on the Pacific railroads and the purchase of these railroads by the government at foreclosure sale. It was Sutro’s idea that the government should hold the transcontinental lines as a great national highway, and permit all American railroads to run their locomotives and cars over it under payment of tolls to be regulated by the Treasury Department. During the summer of 1894 the _San Francisco Examiner_ circulated a petition against the Reilly funding bill, to which, by September 20, it was said that 194,663 names had been attached.[563] In January, 1895, both the Colorado and the California legislatures adopted resolutions opposing the refunding. In California there was not a dissenting vote. The same month another mass meeting was held in San Francisco, and in December, 1895, still another one followed, with the result that a committee of fifty was appointed, and a recommendation sent to the national government.