Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/308

 quote the last stanza, in which the victim is forbidden to kill himself:

Pregnant with possibilities of crime, And full of felons for all coming time, Your blood's too precious to be lightly spilt In testimony to a venial guilt. Live to get whelpage and preserve a name No praise can sweeten and no lie unshame. Live to fulfill the vision that I see Down the dim vistas of the time to be: A dream of clattering beaks and burning eyes Of hungry ravens glooming all the skies; A dream of gleaming teeth and fetid breath Of jackals wrangling at the feast of death; A dream of broken necks and swollen tongues— The whole world's gibbets loaded with de Youngs!

Let us go to Denver, where there lives another fighter and teller of truth, Ben Lindsey. I have made you acquainted with the "Denver Post," and with one of its owners, Mr. F. G. Bonfils, who made his "pile" as a lottery-promoter, and went into partnership with another man. Now let Judge Lindsey introduce us to this other man:

The "Post" was then as independent as a highwayman. One of its proprietors, H. H. Tammen, had begun life as a bar-keeper, and he would himself relate how he had made money by robbing his employer. "When I took in a dollar," Tammen said, "I tossed it up—and if it stuck to the ceiling, it went to the boss." He had a frank way of making his vices engaging by the honesty with which he confessed them; and he had boasted to me of the amount of money the newspaper made by charging its victims for suppressing news-stories of a scandalous nature in which they were involved. He admitted that he supported me merely because it was "the popular thing to do"—it "helped circulation." I knew it was a very precarious support, although the editorial writer, Paul Thieman, seemed to me an honest and public-spirited young man.

Or come to Kansas City, where William Salisbury is working on the "Times." There is a fight on with the gas companies, which have formed a trust and doubled the price of gas. A solitary alderman named Smith has spoken against the ordinance.

When I returned to the "Times" office that night the city editor came up to my desk, sat down, and said, confidentially: "We'll have to print a favorable story on this consolidation. I wouldn't give much space to that man Smith's remarks. I don't know what the gas people