This is a fair question, is it not? The organs of arm-chair respectability ought not to make loose charges against radicals, they ought not condemn without knowledge. So I appeal to my beloved “Evening Post,” which I have read six times per week for ten or twelve years; and the answer comes: “It is not our custom to permit authors to reply to book-reviews, and we see no reason for departing from our practice in order to permit you to advertise your book and to insult us.” And so the matter rests, until a couple of months later, the President of the United States makes an investigation, and his commission issues a report which vindicates every charge I have made. And now what? Does the “Evening Post” apologize to me? Does it do anything to make clear to its readers that it has erred in its sneers at “The Jungle”? The “Evening Post” says not one word; but it still continues to tell the public that I am unworthy of confidence, because I once played a harmless joke with “The Journal of Arthur Stirling”! CHAPTER VI AN ADVENTURE WITH ROOSEVELT I was determined to get something done about the Condemned Meat Industry. I was determined to get something done about the atrocious conditions under which men, women and children were working in the Chicago stockyards. In my efforts to get something done, I was like an animal in a cage. The bars of this cage were newspapers, which stood between me and the public; and inside the cage I roamed up and down, testing one bar after another, and finding them impossible to break. I wrote letters to newspaper editors; I appealed to public men, I engaged an extra secretary and ran a regular publicity bureau in my home. It happened that I had occasion to consult the record of the congressional investigations held after the Spanish-American War, into the quality of canned meat furnished by the Chicago packers. Here was Theodore Roosevelt on the witness-stand, declaring: “I would as soon have eaten my old hat.” And now Theodore Roosevelt was president of the United States, with power to help me if he would! In a moment of inspiration I decided to appeal to him.