Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/235

 readers. He had just got by the difficult place; his printing-company and the bank which owned the printing-company had audited his books, and the bank-auditor had certified that in the first four months of 1911 the magazine "had earned a profit of not less than three thousand and not more than seven thousand dollars per month."

Yet they put "Hampton's Magazine" out of business! Hampton had started Charles Edward Russell's articles exposing the "New Haven" swindle—two or three years before the truth broke out, you understand. An agent from the "New Haven" came to inform him that if he started this publication, he would be put out of business. I now learn for the first time the name of this agent—Sylvester J. Baxter. Readers of the "Profits of Religion" will give a start of recognition: the same gentleman who contributed that wonderful boost of the "New Haven" to the "Outlook," organ of the Clerical Camouflage! And the "Outlook" pretended not to know that this was an official boost of the "New Haven," and to have been astonished when the "New Haven" ordered a big edition of this issue!

Let Ben Hampton tell the rest of the story:

A nice young man got a job in our accounting department. He was one of the finest fellows we had ever had around. He was willing to work days and nights, and he did work days and nights, and one night when he was working, he took a copy of our list of stockholders. Of course, we did not find this out for months. In the meantime, a man and a woman, working separately, visited all our stockholders they could reach and told them I was robbing the Company. They said I had a large estate in the Adirondacks and a home in the Fifth Avenue district of New York City. At that time Mrs. Hampton and I were having a time to buy clothing for the children. We were drawing almost no salary from the magazine, and we had put all our money in the undertaking. In fact, we were near the line of desperation, we were so hard up.

Something like twenty brokers on the Wall Street curb began to advertise our five dollars par stock at four dollars, down to three dollars a share. We sent to them and offered to buy the stock and were never able to buy one share. One of the brokers afterwards admitted to us that they had none of the stock, and that they were paid to do the advertising.

All these methods, of course, created confusion in the minds of our stockholders, and practically killed our efforts to raise thirty thousand dollars, which was the insignificant sum of money needed to pay off our paper bill. We were entitled to a line of credit of three hundred thousand dollars at the paper makers. We owed the paper maker, I think, about forty thousand dollars and he notified us