But the initial fight did not come in the Senate. The Assembly was the battle-ground. The reason for this lies principally in the fact that while Assemblyman W. B. Griffiths, of Napa, raises fast horses, he is not a gambler, and is as much opposed to the bookmaking, pool-selling features of the track as Senator Walker himself. Griffiths was made chairman of the Assembly Committee on Public Morals. While this committee has sundry sins to answer for, nevertheless it made an astonishingly clean record on the Walker-Otis bill. On January 18, less than three weeks after the Legislature had assembled, Chairman Griffiths called his committee together to take up the Walker-Otis bill. Of the nine members of the committee, seven were present, Mott and Mendenhall alone failing to answer to their names. Those present were: Griffiths, Cattell, Young, Dean, Perine, Fleisher and Wilson. The seven members went through the bill paragraph by paragraph and decided unanimously to recommend it for passage. Had a dynamite bomb been set off under the Emeryville gambling establishment, greater consternation could scarcely have seized upon the pro-gambling element. The gamblers realized that the committee's prompt action threatened the machine's plan to delay action on the measure until the closing days of the session. For the moment all interest centered in Mott and Mendenhall, the two members of the committee who had been absent when the measure had been considered. Twenty-four hours developed the fact that Mendenhall sanctioned the action of his seven associates. This made eight of the nine committeemen for the bill. But the ninth member, Assemblyman Mott of Alameda County, was very much offended at what the committee had done. Assemblyman Mott was elected as a Lincoln-Roosevelt League member. Probably the Lincoln-Roosevelt League does not like to be reminded of that unfortunate fact. But the lesson of Mr. Mott is so necessary for the Lincoln-Roosevelt League and all other reform movements that the conspicuous part which Mott played against reform policies cannot be too much insisted upon. To be sure, Mr. Mott voted for the bill when it was up for passage - the Lincoln-Roosevelt Republican platform of his county pledged him to it. But there is a deal of difference between supporting a measure and voting for it[26]. Mott was very much offended at what the committee had done and demanded that another meeting be held. Such a meeting, to accommodate Mr. Mott, was held - held in the office of Speaker Phil Stanton; held behind closed doors; held with Jerk Burke, Southern Pacific lobbyist, safely entrenched across the hall from Speaker Stanton's office in the back office of Sergeant-at-Arms Stafford[27].