Wealth against commonwealth

by Henry Demarest Lloyd

"To get another trial?"

"Anything."

"Another hearing?"

"Anything." Anything to prevent the miscarriage of this last attempt to "round up" the men he had been trying for nearly twenty years to bring to justice. The Attorney-General would not present this petition. After this, still before the final decision, he saw the Attorney-General again to renew his pressure for a change of policy. Three times he saw the Attorney-General to lay his additional facts before him, and urge that a different method of conducting the case be tried.[326] Some of the new points he raised the Attorney-General referred and deferred to the company he was pursuing, and "we showed him how they were fully included in the statement rendered by us to the State, and he (the Attorney-General) expressed his entire satisfaction with every point raised." Others of the new points the Attorney-General declared to be "immaterial."[327] The Attorney-General showed no wish to bring proof into the case of any facts except those furnished by the people being sued. Although the decision of the lower court had been a warning that the theory on which the State had gone into court was bad, and that the amount of taxes to be recovered depended on the amount of tangible property in the State, he refused to use the right he acknowledged he had—to call other witnesses, to put the men who had made the agreed statement of facts upon the stand, and cross-examine them.

From the Attorney-General, who knew little of either the facts, as he confessed, or the law as the court declared it, who accepted their statements as gospel, and who asked them whether new facts offered him should be admitted into his side of the case against them, the company had nothing to fear. But this old opponent of theirs, whom the Attorney-General had employed, was at large, and was a dangerous man. He knew the facts; he had the right theory of the law; he was tremendously in earnest. The case had only got as far as the first decision of the lower court. There were still opportunities for all kinds of legal proceedings. By virtue of this contract he claimed such an interest in the proceedings as to give him a right to ask the courts to interfere. He might get a new trial and carry out his "pet scheme of oral examination." He might rouse the people as he had roused them before. He might interfere through the Legislature. He might raise a storm which could not be quieted until in this suit, or some other, his pet plan might be carried out, of getting these silent gentlemen into a witness-box. He considered himself to be in the service of the State. "I was under a contract with the State,"[328] he says. And we find the Attorney-General in close consultation with him in Philadelphia down to the very last day.

The company sees that something must be done, and does it. Its "trustee" calls upon the expert at his hotel.[329] He renews the suggestion he had made in New York when word had been sent by the expert that he would not be bound by the agreement of facts, and "proposed to attack." He finds his man cast down, utterly discouraged by the decision of the lower court and the attitude of the Attorney-General. Time and again he had seen the people denied justice, and their enemies escape even so much as the necessity of appearing in court. He had seen, in every one of the proceedings against them, from 1872 to 1880, committees of Congress, State governors, judges of the Supreme courts, State legislatures, attorney-generals, railroad officials, every trustee of the people, wilt, like green leaves in a fire, before this flashing wealth. His resolution gave way. He was to have received, under his agreement with the Attorney-General, in salary and commissions, $23,000, or less, according to the amount recovered. That he saw fading out of sight in consequence of the, to him, inexplicable course of the Attorney-General. Every one else who had tried to stand up for the people against this power had gone down; why should he be quixotic and poor?

"We want peace," the "trustee" said, and the, till then, faithful friend of the people sold him all he had of that commodity for $15,400, to be paid in instalments, and a salary of $5000 for a year.

"I proposed to reopen it"—the case—"and I did not."

"Why did you not?"

"Simply because I was assured I should have just as much money out of the transaction as my original contract would have paid me."