ctly well known in Wall Street, and could
not have escaped the knowledge of any magazine editor dealing with
current events. In eight years the "New Haven" had increased its
capitalization 1501 per cent; and what that meant, any office boy in
"the Street" could have told. What attitude should a magazine editor
take to the matter?

At that time there were still two or three free magazines in America.
One of them was Hampton's, and the story of its wrecking by the New
Haven criminals will some day serve in school text-books as the
classic illustration of that financial piracy which brought on the
American social revolution. Ben Hampton had bought the old derelict
"Broadway Magazine", with twelve thousand subscribers, and in four
years, by the simple process of straight truth-telling, had built up
for it a circulation of 440,000. In two years more he would have had a
million; but in May, 1911, he announced a series of articles dealing
with the New Haven management.

The articles, written by Charles Edward Russell, were so exact that
they read today like the reports of the Interstate Commerce
Commission, dated three years later. A representative of the New Haven
called upon the editor of Hampton's with a proof of the first
article--obtained from the printer by bribery--and was invited to
specify the statements to which he took exception; in the presence of
witnesses he went over the article line by line, and specified two
minor errors, which were at once corrected. At the end of the
conference he announced that if the articles were published, Hampton's
Magazine would be "on the rocks in ninety days."

Which threat was carried out to the letter. First came a campaign
among the advertisers of the magazine, which lost an income of
thousands of dollars a month, almost over night. And then came a
campaign among the banks--the magazine could not get credit. Anyone
familiar with the publishing business will understand that a magazine
which is growing rapidly has to have advances to meet each month's
business. Hampton undertook to raise the money by selling stock;
whereupon a spy was introduced into his office as bookkeeper, his list
of subscribers was stolen, and a campaign was begun to destroy their
confidence.

It happened that I was in Hampton's office in the summer of 1911, when
the crisis came. Money had to be had to pay for a huge new edition;
and upon a property worth two millions of dollars, with endorsements
worth a