A year afterward a man came to me with a grip-sack full of documents. He had been expert book-keeper for the water company, and knew the facts and figures for twenty-five years.
Among them were two cancelled checks—one for a thousand, which was made out by and to the president, and dated the day a certain committee was to meet to go over the terms of the contract. The other was made out to a shyster lawyer and was for fifteen thousand. He expected to create a sensation. The thing had worked on his conscience until it became unbearable. He came to me because of what he had learned of me at the water company office. It takes a civic conscience to deal with such a problem and New Haven had no such thing at that time.
He took the documents from one place to another—to ministers, lawyers, judges, legislators, etc. Nothing could be done. They were all the personal friends of the officials.
The papers wouldn't print anything about it. The book-keeper said he thought he knew why "editors never had any water bills." Some radicals got the big check printed in facsimile and scattered it abroad. The aldermen had been bought; there was no doubt of that, but it was a matter of business.
The whole agitation came back on the reformers like a boomerang. Leading politicians determined to do something to vindicate the leading citizen who had been accused. They elected him to the State Senate! A city of a hundred thousand can by either a positive or a negative process, destroy the usefulness of any man who would be its servant.
I felt my loneliness very keenly—indeed, so much so that it was often as though I had committed a great crime. Always, however, at the breaking-point came a word of cheer—a note of approval.
Bishop Lines of Newark, New Jersey, who was then Rector of St. Paul's church, sent me a note, that reached me in a dark hour.
"I do not suppose," he said, "that I look at things as you do, in all respects, but I would like to assure you of my great regard for you and of my implicit faith in your sincerity and goodness. I know that the world's great sorrow rests upon your heart and that many men who feel it not sit in judgment upon you."
The People's Church dwindled to a vanishing point. The farm produced nothing. Autumn came and we lived largely upon apples.
"Make a break!" my wife said, but it seemed like running away from the fight. The fight was already over and I was beaten—beaten, but unaware of defeat.