Also I was horrified and bewildered: could it be that things like this happened in America? Could it be that railroads set themselves up as the ruling power in a community, that they defeated the laws, deprived people of their homes and drove them into exile or outlawry? You see, I was the naive and innocent product of American public schools and of Mr. J. P. Morgan’s university; I really thought that I lived in a democracy, and under the protection of a Constitution. At that very time I was raising campaign funds and helping to elect the president of our university--mine and Mr. Morgan’s--as a “reform” mayor of New York City! I tried to find out about this railroad Octopus, and there was no way to find out. It was a dark secret of American life, crushed completely underground. There was no literature about it, nothing in the newspapers or the magazines, no books or pamphlets in the library of the great university. Now, twenty-three years later, I can tell you of a book in which you may read the life-story of one of these men of the San Joaquin, who were driven to outlawry by the Southern Pacific Railroad. The name of the man is Ed Morrell, and Jack London made him the hero of a novel, “The Star Rover.” They caught him finally and put him in prison, and that is the story he tells in his book, “The Twenty-fifth Man,” one of the most appalling narratives ever penned by a human being. Frank Norris, who taught me something new about my country, had set out deliberately to do that very thing. He explained his ideas in a book, “The Responsibilities of the Novelist”; and I might, if I wanted to take the time, play a trick upon you, by quoting sentences from his book, mixed in with sentences from my book, and you could not tell the difference. For example, who is it that says: “No art that is not in the end understood by the People can live or ever did live a single generation”? Who says: “It is the complaint of the coward, this cry against the novel with a purpose”? Who says: “The muse is a teacher, not a trickster”? Who says: “Truth in fiction is just as real and just as important as truth anywhere else”? It is Frank Norris who says all these things. He goes on to point out that the pulpit reaches us only on Sundays, and the newspaper is quickly forgotten, but the novel stays with us all the time. And yet, facing this responsibility, there are novelists who admit that they write for money, and “you and I and the rest of us do not consider this disreputable!” Norris goes on to voice his own attitude toward his work: “I never truckled; I never took off the hat to Fashion and held it out for pennies. By God, I told them the truth. They liked it or they didn’t like it. What had that to do with me? I told them the truth.”