machine would have preferred to have made its initial fight in the
Senate. If defeated in the Senate, the enemies of the measure could have
jockeyed for delay, prevented the passage of the measure until the
closing hours of the session, and then killed it or forced its
supporters to accept amendments.

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