Barbour County index. [volume] (Medicine Lodge, Kan.) 1880-current, 1907-05-15

WHICH the press was supplied WIN
news-and often and well they had
used this control, and surprisingly
cautious had they been not so to
abuse it that the editors and the pub
lie would become suspicious. When
my war was at its height, when I was
beginning to congratulate myself that
the. huge magazines of THE Seven"
were empty almost to the point at
which they must sue for peace on my
own terms, all in four days 43 of my
81 newspapers-andt they the most i'm
pOrtant-notified me that they would
no longer carry out their contracts to
publish my daily letter. They gave as
their reason, not the real one. fear of
The Seven" but fear that / would
involve them in ruinOus libel suits. I
who had legal proof for every state
ment / made; / who was always care
full to understate! Next, one press
association after another ceased to
| send out my letter as news, though
they had been doing so regularly for
months. The public had grown tired
of the sensation" they said.
l countered with telegram to one
or more newspapers in every city and
large town in the United States:
1.-The Seven are trying to cut the
wires between the truth and the pub
lie. If you wish my daily letter. tele-
my expense"
The response should have warned
1.-The Seven" But it did not. Under
their orders the telegraph companies
| refused to transmit the letter. l got
| an injunction. 1t was obeyed in typi-
| cal, corrupt corporation fashion-they
sent my matter, but so garbled that it
| was unintelligible. l appealed to the
| courts. In vain.
To me, it was clear as sun in cloud
less MONDAY sky that there could be
but one result of this insolent and
| despotic denial of my rights and the
| rights of the people, this public con-
| fession of the truth of my charges.
| l turned everything salable or mort
gageable into cash, locked the cash up
in my private vaults, and waited for
| the cataclysm.
| -Friday-Saturday. Ap-
the people accepted the Wall street
theory that l was an exploded sensa-
| ton" The Seven" began to preen
themselves; the strain upon them to
maintain prices, if no less than for
three months past, was not notably
| greater; the crisis would pass, | and
my exposures would be forgotten, the
routine of reaping the harvests and
leaving only the gleanings for the
sewers would soon be placidly re.
Sumed.
Sunday. Roebuck. taken ill as he
was passing the basket in the church
of which he was the shining light, died
at midnight-a beautiful, peaceful
death, they say, with his daughter
reading the Bible aloud, and his lips
moving in prayer. Some hold that,
had he lived, the tranquility would
have continued; but this is the view of
| those who cannot realize that the tide
of affairs is no more controlled by the
great men than is the river led down
to the sea by it's surface flOtsam, by
which we measure the speed and di-
rection of its current. Under that ter
rifle tension, which to the shallow
seemed a calm, something had to
give way If the dam had not yielded
where Roebuck stood guard, it must
have Welded somewhere else, or might
have gone all in one grand crash.
Monday. You know the story Of the
artist and his Statue of Grief-how he
nodded the features hundred times,
always failing, always getting an anti
climax. until at last in despair he gave
up the impossible and finished the
statue with a veil over the face.
have tried again and again to assem-
BILE words that would give some not
too inadequate impression of that tre-
mendous week in which, with success
sion of explosions, each like the crack
of doom, the financial structure that
housed S0,000,000 of people burst, col
lapsed, was engulfed. l cannot.
must leave it to your memory or your
imagination.
For years the financial leaders,
craZed by the excess of power which
the people had in ignorance and over
confidence and slovenly good-nature
permitted them to- acquire, had been
tearing out the honest foundations on
which alone so vast structure can
hone to rest solid and secure. They
had been substituting rotten beams
| painted TO look like stone and iron.
The crash had to come! the sooner,
the better-when a thing is wrong,
each DAYS delay compounds the cost
of righting it. So, with all the horrors
of Wild Week in mind, all its phys
Lical and mental suffering, all its ruin
and rioting and bloodshel, l still can
insist that l am justly proud of my
share in bringing it about. The blame
and the shame are wholly upon tho2o
who made Wild Week" necessary and
| inevitable.
In catastrophes. the cry is Each for
himself" But in a cataclysm. the
obvious wise selfishness is generosity,
and the cry is: Stand together, for.
singIy. we perish This was cata-