In January, 1907, a man by the name of Williams purchased the Times for seventy-five dollars, giving his unsecured note for that amount. In less than a month the new proprietor had received $500 from an agent of the United Railroads. Later on, he received a regular subsidy of $250 a week, something more than $1,000 a month, which continued for thirteen weeks. The subsidy was later reduced to fifty dollars a week. But during the interim between the weekly subsidy contracts, lump sums were paid. It is estimated that in little over a year, Williams received from agents of the United Railroads upwards of $7,000. The Times at first covertly, and later openly, opposed the prosecution. If the unimportant Mission Times, which at the opening of the year 1907 had changed hands for seventy-five dollars, received upwards of $7,000 from agents of the defense, the not unreasonable question may be asked, what did more important weekly papers, whose graft prosecution policy was practically the same as that of the Times, receive? In this connection it is pertinent to say that the majority of these publications gave evidence during 1907, of a prosperity that was quite as mysterious, if not as suggestive, as had been the prosperity of the Schmitz-Ruef Supervisors during 1906. As has been seen, the entire daily press of San Francisco was, in the beginning, heartily in accord with the prosecution. Gradually, however, The Examiner and The Chronicle[270] shifted their policy. Even while The Chronicle was backing the prosecution in its editorial columns, its reports of the proceedings at the various hearings were colored in a way well-calculated to undermine Langdon and his associates.[271] Gradually the covert opposition of its news columns became the open editorial policy of the paper. But the most effective opposition came from The Examiner. The Examiner supported the prosecution until the conviction of Schmitz and the change in the municipal administration. Failure to dictate the selection of Mayor and Supervisors may have had more or less influence in the change of policy. At any rate, the invention of The Examiner's writers and artists was tortured to make the prosecution appear to disadvantage. The most tawdrily clever of The Examiner's efforts were the so-called "Mutt cartoons." The cartoons appeared from day to day, a continuous burlesque of the work of the prosecutors, and of the graft trials.