Soon after taking office Dr. Hutchinson began an investigation of the water supplies of the chief cities of Oregon. His report showed that the water that private corporations were serving to municipalities carried typhoid infection. Immediately the business interests of the State turned their guns upon him. Through the newspapers, which they controlled by reason of advertising contracts, they denounced him as an “enemy of the State.” “The fair fame of the commonwealth” was being traduced by a reckless maligner. He was even dared to show his face in one city. An attempt was made to remove him from office, but the governor happened to be a man who could not be browbeaten, and Dr. Hutchinson remained. But while the business interests of Oregon were not able to get the governor, they got somebody. The city officials who could have purified the water took no step to do so. If they had merely recognized the existence of infected water and urged the people to boil it, some service would have been performed. But the municipal officials upheld the “fair fame” of their various communities by denying that the water was infected. Notwithstanding their denials typhoid soon broke out. The outbreak at Eugene, the seat of the State university, was particularly severe. Several students died. Yet the San Francisco plague case must long stand as the classic illustration of the manner in which business fights government when a great disease comes. Black plague—the deadliest known to the Orient; a disease that, more than once, has killed 5,000,000 persons during a single outbreak—appeared in San Francisco in 1900. The local board of health quarantined the Chinese district, and the news went out over the country. The horror of horrors had arrived! The black plague! It sent a shudder over the land. It sent a greater shudder over the business interests of San Francisco. These business interests quickly saw visions of quarantines against the State and cessation of tourist traffic. An appeal was made to a Federal Judge to declare the quarantine illegal. He promptly did so. In giving his decision, he went out of his way to make this statement: “If it were within the province of this court to decide the point, I should hold that there is not now, and never has been, a case of plague in this city.” The local board of health that discovered the plague was removed, as was the State board of health that confirmed the prevalence of the disease. The governor of the State sent a remarkable message to the Legislature in which he denounced those who said plague existed in San Francisco, and appointed a committee of physicians and big business men to go to the California metropolis and make an “impartial” investigation. The business men on the committee included the biggest bankers and merchants in California. They reported in the most positive terms that there was no plague.