A little later I happened to be on the Pacific coast, and made the test once more. I was putting on some plays, and it happened that a newspaper had played me a dirty trick that morning. So in my curtain-speech I said what I thought of American newspapers, and told this Chicago story. Just one newspaper in San Francisco published a line about the matter, and that was the “Bulletin,” edited by Fremont Older, who happened to be a personal friend, and one of the few independent newspaper editors in America. Excepting for Socialist papers, the “Bulletin” has the distinction of being the only American newspaper which has ever printed that story. I say the only American newspaper; I might say the only newspaper in the world. Some time afterwards there was a scandal about American meat in England, and the “London Daily Telegraph” requested me to cable them “without limit” any information I had as to present conditions in Packingtown. I sent them a couple of thousand words of this “New York Herald” story, but they did not publish a line of it. They had, of course, the fear that they might be sued for libel by the “Herald.” It is no protection to you in England that you are publishing the truth, for the maxim of the law of England is: “The greater the truth the greater the libel.” Also, no doubt, they were influenced by newspaper solidarity—a new kind of honor among thieves. CHAPTER IX AIMING AT THE PUBLIC’S HEART The publication of “The Jungle” had brought me pitiful letters from workingmen and women in others of our great American slave-pens, and I went to Ridgway of “Everybody’s” with the proposition to write a series of articles dealing with the glass industry, the steel industry, the coal-mines, the cotton-mills, the lumber-camps. I offered to do all the work of investigating myself; my proposition was accepted and I set to work.