Said Sutro in conversation years after: "Ah! it
was a hard thing to see so many old friends in Virginia
City and San Francisco actually afraid to be seen talk-
ing to me after the fiat had gone forth that I was to
be crushed. But I kept on fighting. There was one
time, I remember, when I had to go to Washington
to save my interests from destruction. I had no money



200 THE STORY OP THE MINE.
left. All the profits of my mill had been swallowed
up. I had a town lot in a little California town, and
I sold it for two hundred dollars. With that I managed
to get to Washington. I staid there, somehow, all
winter, poor as I was; I fought my enemies and I came
out ahead. But they wrote to all the newspapers that
I had bribed Congress — out of my two hundred dol-
lars! "

At last, in sheer desperation, Sutro turned to the
working miners of the Comstock. He hired Piper's
Opera House in Virginia City and addressed them with
bitter eloquence, every stroke of which went home.
He denounced the unchecked avarice of the men who
ruled the Bank of California and the famous Mining
and Milling syndicate. What did they care for the
toilers? What enterprise that tended to loosen their
grip on every industry in Nevada could fail to gain
their hatred? He went on to contrast, in brief, ter-
rible sentences, the disasters from heat and fire to which
the selfishness of these capitalists subjected them with
the comfort and safety which the tunnel would afford.
