Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/45



“If you are a good friend of mine,” said Mark, “you shouldn’t ask me to do anything wrong.”

“Don’t you know,” said Wanser, “that every dollar I have in the world is in this thing ?”

Mark Fagan couldn’t see the relevancy of this; he talked about other people having every dollar that they had in houses and lots, and yet paying taxes. As General Wanser remarked when he left in high dudgeon, Mark Fagan had “damn queer ideas about things.”

He had, and he has. One of his queer ideas is what may be called a sense of public property. All men know that private property is sacred; for centuries that sense has been borne in upon us till even thieves know it is wrong to steal private property. But highly civilized men lack all sense of the sacredness of public property; from timber lands to city streets that is a private graft. And when one day the Mayor received an anonymous note advising him to have the underlying franchise of the trolley company looked up, he was interested. He had the note copied in typewriting, then he scrupulously destroyed the original. The copy he gave to Corporation Counsel Record. Mr. Record discovered to his amazement that the franchise had expired. We need not go into details. The Mayor and his cabinet decided to take the matter into the courts; if the court