And do you think that the owner of the “Bulletin” was alone among San Francisco newspaper owners in the possession of an itching palm? The “San Francisco Liberator,” organ of the reformers, showed how, in the effort to keep the president of “United Railroads” out of jail, every crime up to murder had been committed. Armed mobs had been organized to resist the city’s authority; thieves had been hired and safes broken open, juries had been bribed and witnesses spirited away; last, but not least, public sentiment had been corrupted through the press. The “Liberator” gives names and dates, a whole mass of detail, which would fill a chapter of this book. One example, well authenticated: One little local paper had been purchased for seventy-five dollars, and in a period of thirteen weeks had obtained thirty-two hundred and fifty dollars from the publicity-bureau of “United Railroads”! And as I write there comes to me a letter from an editor of one of San Francisco’s largest newspapers, a man who knows the game from A to Z. He tells me the sordid history of “Mike” de Young’s “San Francisco Chronicle”: The owner’s brother was murdered not many years ago, because of a blackmail story run in the paper. During the war it was he who got the San Francisco Publishers’ Association to charge the government full advertising rates for all war loan organizations, etc. He was a strong ally of the Southern Pacific when that road ran California, and still fights for the railroads whenever he gets a chance. I write to others in San Francisco, to be sure that I am making no mistake. One sends me a letter by Arthur McEwen, a well-known journalist, made public twenty-five years ago. Mr. de Young, says McEwen, has a grammar of his own; he speaks of being “attackted,” and he made famous the phrase, “the tout ensemble of the whole.” He is a multi-millionaire, but for years had refused to pay fifteen dollars a month to keep his insane brother out of the paupers’ ward of the asylum. He plunders the big corporations mercilessly, “having never been able to see why he should not share in their prosperity.” Says McEwen: He set up in court the contention that it is legitimate for a newspaper to sell its editorial columns, and though he was reviled by his startled contemporaries for that dangerous frankness, there is no reason to doubt that he was sincere or unaffectedly astonished at the notion of there being aught disgraceful in his admission.... Not until the archives of the Crocker family have been opened to the historian will it be known whether or not the common report be true which affirms that “the title deeds to his California street mansion are the intercepted love letters of a millionaire.” Another friend sends me a poem by Ambrose Bierce, entitled “A Lifted Finger.” It is one of the most withering denunciations of a human being ever penned. As a sample I quote the last stanza, in which the victim is forbidden to kill himself: