thieves to baptize themselves--or
shall we say to have the water in their stocks made "holy"? Says our
pious editor, for the government to take property without full
compensation "would be contrary to the whole spirit of America."

#The Outlook for Graft#

Anyone familiar with the magazine world will understand that such
crooked work as this, continued over a long period, is not done for
nothing. Any magazine writer would know, the instant he saw the Baxter
article, that Baxter was paid by the New Haven, and that the "Outlook"
also was paid by the New Haven. Generally he has no way of proving
such facts, and has to sit in silence; but when his board bill falls
due and his landlady is persistent, he experiences a direct and
earnest hatred of the crooks of journalism who thrive at his expense.
If he is a Socialist, he looks forward to the day when he may sit on a
Publications' Graft Commission, with access to all magazine books
which have not yet been burned!

In the case of the New Haven, we know a part of the price--thanks to
the labors of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Needless to say, you
will not find the facts recorded in the columns of the Outlook; you
might have read it line by line from the palmy days of Mellen to our
own, and you would have got no hint of what the Commission revealed
about magazine and newspaper graft. Nor would you have got much more
from the great metropolitan dailies, which systematically "played
down" the expose, omitting all the really damaging details. You would
have to go to the reports of the Commission--or to the files of
"Pearson's Magazine", which is out of print and not found in
libraries!

According to the New Haven's books, and by the admission of its own
officials, the road was spending more than four hundred thousand
dollars a year to influence newspapers and magazines in favor of its
policies. (President Mellen stated that this was relatively less than
any other railroad in the country was spending). There was a professor
of the Harvard Law School, going about lecturing to boards of trade,
urging in the name of economic science the repeal of laws against
railroad monopolies--and being paid for his speeches out of railroad
funds! There was a swarm of newspaper reporters, writing on railroad
affairs for the leading papers of New England, and getting twenty-five
dollars weekly, or two or three hundred on special occasions. Sums had
been paid directly to more than a thousa