Luke was impressed. He secured favorable reports from a financial agency and from a firm of expert accountants. Then he invested his fortune in R. H. Forbes & Son.
§2. About this time, the United States Senate happened to be investigating itself and unavoidably stumbled upon a witness whose testimony filled all the newspapers for several weeks and remained a matter of public comment for quite two months. Perhaps because he had fallen out with his employers, this witness insisted upon telling how he had for ten years been hired by a combination of the ruling corporations to influence national legislation. Five hundred letters and telegrams substantiated his assertions; he gave dates and mentioned places; the names of popular idols fell from his lips with infinite carelessness, and the idols broke as their names fell.
Speaking in unimpassioned detail, the informer showed how his activities had covered the entire country and included the chiefs of both the large parties with a splendid catholicity. He had bought the services of labor leaders to end strikes, had broken up unions by purchasing information from their members, and had ended one dispute by having himself appointed a member of its arbitration board. He had operated in congressional campaigns throughout the Union, and he told how he had bought the defeat at the polls of members of Congress that sought re-election after having opposed the corporate interests at Washington, and how he had spent thousands of the trusts' dollars in electing candidates who, personally or through their bosses, promised that they would support a high tariff and prevent the passage of laws too kindly to the working class. He had hired congressional clerks and pages, the former to betray what advance information came to them, the latter to pick up valuable gossip. He had the secretaries of Congressmen on his salary-roll when he could not buy or defeat their masters or when, having bought those masters, he feared treachery. He had secured the appointment of those legislators in his pay to important committees, and he had, he said, planned and secured the establishment of a national tariff commission for the benefit of the powers he served. Those powers were headed by the man that Jack Porcellis likened to Shakespeare and that the derelict in the Essex Street saloon called the King.
Luke, who of course had nothing to do with the management of the Forbes company, nevertheless occasionally passed an evening at the quiet Brooklyn home of its president, who was a widower living alone with his only child, Betty, a pretty, high-colored, brown-eyed girl, as yet unformed and only twenty-two years old. As a rule, these two men sat in the parlor, a room that retained the character of Forbes's grandfather, and talked of everything and nothing, the girl rarely intruding upon them. It was inevitable that they should, during the floodtide of the Washington scandal, speak of its revelations.
"I don't know what to make of them," sighed Luke. "It seems as if the fellows at the head of our party were no better than the fellows at the head of the other."
"They are not," said Forbes with conviction. "Here they all are blackmailing the tariff, a system the country owes all its prosperity to."
"We shall have to pick honest leaders in the future," Luke reflected. He still believed in the power of a party's individual members. "We've simply been too easy-going in the past."
Forbes thought this would avail nothing.
"The parties themselves are rotten," he declared, "and the deeper a man gets into them, no matter how well he starts out, the more certain he is to be infected. You see how even the good measures are fraudulently put through. Then here's our own state with a Governor we all believed in—a Democrat, to be sure, but an anti-Tammany man. He comes out for a fine thing like direct primaries. Well, the other day an Assemblyman I know went to him and asked him to sign a bill this Assemblyman wanted passed. What happened? The Governor said: 'Will you vote for the direct primary law?' The Assemblyman happens to be a fool and against that law. He said he'd vote against it, and he tells me the Governor told him in that case the other bill wouldn't be signed. No, the thing we need in this country is a brand-new party run by honest business men on sound business principles."
Luke could not yet consider such a revolution; but the next day the papers contained further news of the senatorial investigation, which lent weight to Forbes's opinion. A witness, after testimony further entangling that great financier whose power seemed to pervade the country's entire industrial system, described an alleged forgery in the books of a railway known to be controlled by Porcellis's hero and eager to evade the anti-trust laws. According to this witness, a "double entry" of $2,000,000, representing securities that the road assumed in taking over two other roads, was carried in the "Consolidated balance sheet" for some time, then erased from one side of the ledger, and left as a credit balance on the other side.