I had Kelly’s permission to tell the story in the form of a thinly veiled allegory, the meaning of which no one could possibly miss. I took the proposition to the “American Magazine,” which signed a contract with me to publish the story as a serial. I set to work to write it, but meantime the “American Magazine” must have begun to hear from Wall Street. It was not very long before John S. Phillips, editor of the magazine, was sending for me and pleading with me as a personal favor to let him off from this contract. I did so, and so ends the chapter of my dealings with another of our great organs of publicity. I know no more pitiful story in the history of our Journalism than that of the “American Magazine.” It was founded because Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker and Finley Peter Dunne found they were no longer permitted to tell the truth in “McClure’s.” They purchased the “American,” assuming a debt of four hundred thousand dollars. Soon afterwards one of the assistant editors told me that they were having trouble in meeting their interest payments; and then came a crisis, plainly revealed in their columns. The magazine had begun the publication of a sensational series of articles, “Barbarous Mexico,” by John Kenneth Turner. These articles, since published in book form, and a second time suppressed, gave an intimate, first-hand account of the ferocities of the Diaz régime, under which American “dollar diplomats” were coining enormous fortunes. The “American” began the publication with a grand hurrah; it published two or three of the articles, and then suddenly it quit, with a feeble and obviously dishonest excuse—and poor Turner had to take his articles to that refuge of suppressed muck-rakers, the “Appeal to Reason.”