he duplicity of a Tweed and the
cunning of a Quay?

Would a president who is honest with the people clandestinely consort
with the villain he characterizes as a liar and all that is vicious?

The disclosures made in the secret correspondence strip the president of
the last shred of deception with which to cloak his perfidy. The mask is
lifted and the exposure is complete. It is in the president's own
handwriting in a letter to Harriman that would never have seen the light
had not circumstances forced it upon the attention of a betrayed people.
It is adroitly phrased, but its meaning is not in doubt. He knew
Harriman then as he knows him now; wanted his boodle and insinuatingly
coaxed him to sneak to the White House when no one was looking, and only
after he was discovered did he denounce Harriman as a liar and fall into
his usual fit of moral epilepsy.

From now on there will be a sharp decline in the stock of Theodore
Roosevelt. The capitalist papers may continue to boom him as the only
savior and his corps of press agents at the White House may continue to
grind out three-column stories about the awful conspiracy of his
"trusty" friends to ruin him, but his bubble is pricked and the cheap
glory in which he reveled is departing forever.

The people have been sadly deceived for a time, but the march of events
is opening their eyes.

Only the very ignorant and foolish believe that a president who has
surrounded himself with Wall Street darlings as cabinet ministers has
any serious designs on the trusts.

The Ryan, Root and Roosevelt combination is ideal. It speaks for itself,
and with such shining lights as Taft, Cortelyou, Knox and Paul Morton
surrounding it, all lingering doubt is removed, and the fools' paradise
is in the full blaze of its glory.

Space will not permit a review of the personnel of the president's
official family, at least two of whom, had the law been enforced, would
now be in penitentiary.

The story of President Roosevelt and Paul Morton, if truthfully told,
would make a luminous chapter in railroad rascality and political
jobbery. It was to this notorious strike-breaker and self-confessed
criminal that Roosevelt issued a bill of moral rectitude long as Pope's
essay that landed him into the eighty-thousand-dollars-a-year insurance
graft he now holds down.

There is in this "promotion" the very climax of the irony of boodle.

Paul Morton, who began as a strike-breaker on the C. B. & Q., a