“Why?”
“You know what'd become of me if I didn't.”
“You might become an honest man and get self-respect,” I suggested with friendly satire.
“That's all very well for you to say,” was his laughing retort. “You've made yourself tight and tidy for the blow. But I've a family, and a damned expensive one, too. And if I didn't stand by this gang, they'd take everything I've got away from me. No, Matt, each of us to his own game. What is your game, anyhow?”
“Fun—just fun. Playing the pipe to see the big fellows dance.”
But he didn't believe it. And no one has believed it—not even my most devoted followers. To this day Joe Ball more than half suspects that my real objective was huge personal gain. That any rich man should do anything except for the purpose of growing richer seems incredible. That any rich man should retain or regain the sympathies and viewpoint of the class from which he sprang, and should become a “traitor” to the class to which he belongs, seems preposterous. I confess I don't fully understand my own case. Who ever does?
My “daily letters” had now ceased to be advertisements, had become news, sought by all the newspapers of this country and of the big cities in Great Britain. I could have made a large saving by no longer paying my sixty-odd regular papers for inserting them. But I was looking too far ahead to blunder into that fatal mistake. Instead, I signed a year's contract with each of my papers, they guaranteeing to print my advertisements, I guaranteeing to protect them against loss on libel suits. I organized a dummy news bureau, and through it got contracts with the telegraph companies. Thus insured against the cutting of my communications with the public, I was ready for the real campaign.
It began with my “History of the National Coal Company.” I need not repeat that famous history here. I need recall only the main points—how I proved that the common stock was actually worth less than two dollars a share, that the bonds were worth less than twenty-five dollars in the hundred, that both stock and bonds were illegal; my detailed recital of the crimes of Roebuck, Melville and Langdon in wrecking mining properties, in wrecking coal railways, in ejecting American labor and substituting helots from eastern Europe; how they had swindled and lied and bribed; how they had twisted the books of the companies, how they were planning to unload the mass of almost worthless securities at high prices, then to get from under the market and let the bonds and stocks drop down to where they could buy them in on terms that would yield them more than two hundred and fifty per cent, on the actual capital invested. Less and dearer coal; lower wages and more ignorant laborers; enormous profits absorbed without mercy into a few pockets.
On the day the seventh chapter of this history appeared, the telegraph companies notified me that they would transmit no more of my matter. They feared the consequences in libel suits, explained Moseby, general manager of one of the companies.
“But I guarantee to protect you,” said I. “I will give bond in any amount you ask.”