But this false philosophy slowly was undermined. Not only was it found that graft did cost money to the state, but it became a certainty that it was costing something even more valuable than money. Graft became the one object of the political seeker after office. The impersonal graft-giver was a hanger-on at lawmaking centers, and the political graft-seeker was insisting upon election or appointment to the machine positions. HIDEOUS PERIL IS REVEALED. The result, first, was a campaign upon the man who had the graft to dispense. He was sought out, and was found in high places. His lobbyists were more easily marked than was the principal. So the law and the law's executive began also to campaign against the lobbyists. Suddenly the "good fellow" at a state capitol who had with him the perquisites of good fellowship in graft measure found himself facing the interrogation: "What are you doing here?" The scope of the query has grown, and it is still growing, in some quarters even to the point of requiring the man who is elected to office to render the cost figure of his successful campaign. All over the country, and touching nearly every relation in official, commercial and financial life, men have been put on the griddle of publicity by courts and commissions, and with backs to the wall have been sitting in the witness chair, holding to the one surly response to an irritating, penetrating cross-examination: "Decline to answer on advice of counsel." But for all purposes of publicity have not these refusals to answer carried light enough? "The public be d----d!" was the original first utterance of the millionaire, designed to stop interrogations which would not down. "What are you going to do about it?" was the counter question of the political grafter who once was charged with grafting. "Where did he get it?" came to be a question of the politician for political purposes, and within a year the country has heard non-political bodies asking the same question of the millionaire philanthropist who has been trying to give it away. Under the growing interrogations of the time, names have been thrown from pedestals within a year as names never before were juggled by the fates. [Illustration: THE CAVE OF DESPAIR.] IDOLS COVERED WITH SLIME. Depew, once a candidate for nomination for the presidency, a United States senator still by some grace of toleration, and at one time referred to in European royal circles as a "representative American citizen." United States Senator Mitchell became a derelict, politically and socially. United States Senator Thomas C. Platt was wrecked in the wreckage. United States Senator Burton became blackened in the charges of graft. Depew is a name no longer to conjure with. Then followed a long list of the commercially and financially prominent civilians, blackened, and with such blackness as never to be white again by any of the old processes which once sufficed.