Such a catastrophe seemed imminent some years ago when the Sugar Trust was before the United States Senate for some legislation necessary to bolster up its monopoly. Its agents had either been less cautious than usual in disguising the raw bribery they were perpetrating, or this particular Senate was too brazen to take the usual precautions to hide its greed from the world. In any case, so great an outcry was made in the press of the country that some sacrifice to the people's wrath was called for--one of those familiar sacrifices which, at intervals of ten or fifteen years in this republic, our rulers make to the great god Integrity. An investigation was organized, and a Senatorial inquisition had before it eminent sugar capitalists and many other distinguished gentlemen who could by no possibility shed light on the transactions, and then, realizing that a show of earnestness, at least, was demanded, it was agreed that some member of Moore & Schley's firm must go on the witness-stand, and, on refusing to tell which Senators had speculated in sugar, must be sent to jail. This grandstand play, it was calculated, and rightly, would so hold the attention of the American people that when the committee concluded its investigation with the usual loud acclaim of duty well done, its Draconian punishment of the unsubmissive broker would act as another ten years' stay against outcry. When this stratagem was decided on, John Moore announced that he as head of the firm should be the sacrifice. But the representatives of the "System" and the Senate firmly refused to assign him that role, and instead, to his grief and anger, nominated for jail the associate member who had charge of Moore & Schley's Washington business, whom they declared the logical victim. During the thirty days that his friend and partner spent behind the bars John Moore's hair whitened more than in all the years before, and from that time until his death he refused firmly to take part in his old line of work, or was ever again his old jovial self. FOOTNOTES: [13] Over a year after the publication of this statement startled the country, John A. McCall, President of the New York Life Insurance Company, and George W. Perkins, Vice-President of the same company and partner of J. Pierpont Morgan, were compelled to confess that they had contributed from their policy-holders' deposits, large amounts of money to a fund to defeat Bryan in 1896 and to the Republican campaign funds of the two following presidential elections, and that they gloried in it. At the same time Jacob Schiff, director of the Equitable Life and a partner in the great international banking-house of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., admitted that funds belonging to the policy-holders of the "Big Three," the New York, the Mutual, and the Equitable, were used in a joint fund to influence the Legislature of every State in the Union. [14] President McCall used almost the same language in September, 1905, in justifying his payment.