I write the above _a priori_; that is to say, I understand American Capitalism so well that I venture to guess what it plans to do with its foreign-language press machine. And six months later, as I am sending this book to the printer, I discover that I have guessed correctly! The great steel-strike is on, and the following appears in an Associated Press dispatch from Youngstown, Ohio: Managers of five foreign language newspapers today decided to publish special editions of their papers explaining to their countrymen that if they are satisfied with present mill-conditions they should meet and vote on the question of returning to work. And, on the other hand, if the foreign-language newspapers decide to get along without advertising, and to stand by the workers, what then? Then we denounce them as Bolsheviks, and demand deportation of their editors and publishers; we raid their offices and confiscate their lists and bar them from our mails. If necessary, some of our corrupt interests “frame up” evidence against them, and throw their editors and publishers into jail. The above may sound to you an extreme statement. But as this book is going to press I come upon definite evidence of precisely such a case, and you will find it in full in the last chapter. CHAPTER XLVIII POISON IVY I have asked the difficult question, When is a bribe not a bribe? When it is “legitimate business”? When, for instance, the “New Haven” is discovered to have ordered 9,716 copies of the “Outlook” containing a boost of the “New Haven” system by Sylvester J. Baxter, a paid writer of the “New Haven”? You may read the details of this in “The Profits of Religion”; the president of the “Outlook” corporation wrote to me that the “New Haven” bought these copies “without any previous understanding or arrangement.” They are so naïve in the office of this religious weekly; nobody had the slightest idea that if they boosted some railroad grafters in peril of discovery, these grafters might come back with a big order! And right now, while the railroads are trying to get their properties back, and all their debts paid out of the public treasury, the spending of millions of dollars upon advertising is perfectly legitimate—it does not have the slightest effect upon newspaper editorial policy! When the miners of Colorado go on strike, and the Rockefellers proceed to fill every daily and weekly newspaper in the state of Colorado with full-page broad-sides against the miners, this of course is not a bribe; the fact that on the page opposite there will appear an editorial, reproducing completely the point of view of the advertisements—that is a pure coincidence, and the editorial is the honorable and disinterested opinion of the newspaper editor! When the United States Commission on Industrial Relations exposes the fact that these attacks on the miners contain the most outrageous lies, and that