that day on, the greenback became a dead issue.

Another factor of great importance was the large increase in the volume
of the currency. In 1881 the currency, which had averaged about
$725,000,000 for the years 1876-1878, reached over $1,111,000,000. Under
these conditions, all that remained available to the platform-makers and
propagandists of the party was their opposition to the so-called
"monopolistic" national banks with their control over currency and to
the refunding of the bonded debt of the government.

The disappearance of the financial issue snapped the threads which had
held together the farmer and the wage-worker. So long as depression
continued, the issue was financial and the two had, as they thought, a
common enemy--the banker. The financial issue once settled, or at least
suspended, the object of the attack by labor became the employer, and
that of the attack by the farmer--the railway corporation and the
warehouse man. Prosperity had mitigated the grievances of both classes,
but while the farmer still had a great deal to expect from politics in
the form of state regulation of railway rates, the wage earners'
struggle now turned entirely economic and not political.

In California, as in the Eastern industrial States, the railway strikes
of 1877 precipitated a political movement. California had retained gold
as currency throughout the entire period of paper money, and the labor
movement at no time had accepted the greenback platform. The political
issue after 1877 was racial, not financial, and the weapon was not
merely the ballot, but also "direct action"--violence. The anti-Chinese
agitation in California, culminating as it did in the Exclusion Law
passed by Congress in 1882, was doubtless the most important single
factor in the history of American labor, for without it the entire