The Washington times., 1911-09-03
SEEKING THE TRUTH ABOUT
MARTIN.

know the merits of the contest, lost In
the maze of conflicting testimony.
Senator Martin, confronted by the
publicity of mass of letters that
would damn a public man in almost
any State in the Union, and that
would do it in Virginia if the power
of the old offce-holding machines were
not so effectively supplemented by a
conspiracy of silence, has been shout
ing stop thief!' at the top of his
voice; rolling his eyes to heaven, pro-
claiming that such outrageous charges
ought to be ignored; hurting reams OF
balderdash about the honor" of the
noble old State being assailed by his
opponent.
Every revelation of his own du-
plicity in dealing with the railroads
and other special interests while he
was a public servant, has been met
with a new gush of this sort of denial
that denies nothing.
The evidence which Representative
Jones has produced in the last two or
three days would not be needed in
Washington, where Mr.. Martins record
as a thick-and-thin supporter of the
railroads has become so Notorious that
nobody asks proof. But in Virginia
they seem not to have much illumi-
nation on these points, and they de-
mand the most detailed proof. Ap.
parently, nothing short of testimony
which will force a confession from
Martin, will be satisfactory to a large
share of the people. That testimony
Jones has at last produced.
At Petersburg on Tuesday evening
last Mr.. Jones read and exhibited three
letters, in Senator Martins own hand
writing, written to William A. Glas-
gov, of Philadelphia, general counsel
for the Norfolk and Western railroad.
The most important of these was quite
lengthy, an insistent appeal to the
railroad company to contribute to the
Virginia campaign of that year. It
warned Glasgow that Representative
Hal" Flood-then running for the
State senate-was hard pressed; that
the railroads had always been able
to rely on'' Flood; that Flood had in
CURED much unpopularity because of
this firm friendship for the railroads;
and that unless the railroads now
stood by him in substantial manner,
he, and various other legislative can
didates, who, like him, had been de-
voted friends to the railroads, were
likely to be defeated and an extremist
legislature to be elected.
The special significance of this letter
is not merely that Martin was begging
for railroad money; that sort of thing
does not seem to discredit a public
man much in Virginia. But early in
the present campaign Martin gave his
word that from his election to the
Senate he never had anything to do
with the railroads, never solicited them
for money, and held himself entirely
Independent of them.
Thus the Glasgow letter-as well as
many others equally significant, which
Jones has read-shows Martin not
merely as a Senatorial go-between,
holding up the railroads for money,
but as having given his word to the
State and then had that word. proved
worthless. They don't much like that
kind of thing in Virginia.
Forced to admit these letters, Mar
tin explains very Imply that he ex-
hausted all his resources to get money
from the railroads, in order to "save
the States supremacy to the white
race" That is always a good expla-
nation in Virginia; anything, seem
ingly, can be palliated if the expla-
nation be made that it had to be
done in order to prevent negro domi-
nation.
The trouble is that the Glasgow let
ters prove another motive. Martin
asked for money to save, not WHITE
SUPREMACY, but RAILROAD SU-
PREMACY. The "white supremacy"
business was buncombe; the same sort
of goods as the old "bloody shirt"
business that used to go in the North.
The fact is, if Virginia wants to
know, that Martin has never deviated
from a consistent course of support
ing railroad interests since he has been
in Washington. Nobody at the Senate
wing of the Capitol has ventured an
uncertainty on that point since he has
been a Senator. There is not another
Democratic Senator so notoriously a
railroad man as he; not one. There
are few who vote just as often for
the railroad side as he, but none is so
well known as worker, booster, a
middleman for the railroad influence
in the Senate as Martin.
The case which Jones has presented