Many newspaper publications have been made subjects of special investigation by committees of Congress, but in no instance has a threat of expulsion from the gallery or of prosecution in the courts produced any practical results; and the locking up of recusant committee witnesses has become a mere mockery. The most notable case on record was that of Hallet Kilbourn, a former journalist who had become a real estate broker and a leading participant in a local land syndicate which the House undertook to investigate. Kilbourn was commanded to produce certain account-books, as well as the names and addresses of sundry persons who, not being members of Congress, he insisted were outside the jurisdiction of that body. For his refusal to furnish the information demanded he was thrown into jail and kept there nearly six weeks. From the first, he had declared that he had no objection to opening his accounts to the whole world or to publishing the data desired, as all the transactions covered by the inquiry had been honorable; and this assertion he proved later by voluntarily printing everything. But he was resolved to make a legal test of the right of Congress to arrogate to itself the arbitrary powers of a court of justice, and he got a good deal of enjoyment out of the experience. For the whole period of his imprisonment he lived like a prince at the expense of the contingent fund of the House; drove about the city at will in a carriage, merely accompanied by a deputy sergeant-at-arms; and entertained his friends at dinner within the jail walls. Of course, the newspapers exploited the whole episode gladly, and when he had held his prosecutors up to popular ridicule long enough, he sued out a writ of habeas corpus and was released. Then he brought a suit for damages against the Sergeant-at-Arms for false imprisonment and won it on appeal after appeal, till the Supreme Court of the United States handed down a sweeping decision that “there is not found in the Constitution any general power vested in either house to punish for contempt.” In spite of the efforts of all the judges in the lower courts to cut down the damages granted by their juries, Congress was finally obliged to pay Kilbourn twenty thousand dollars, or about five hundred dollars a day for his forty days’ incarceration. It took him nine years to carry his case through all its stages.