Mr. Teddy Bliss exercised his best connoisseurship in selecting the dishes from the printed broadside put before him at the hotel restaurant, consulting Isabelle frequently as to her tastes, where the desire to please was mingled with the pride of appearing self-possessed. Having finally decided on tomato bisque aux crutons, prairie chicken, grilled sweet potatoes, salad and peche Melba, which was all very much to his liking, he dropped the card and looked at Isabelle with a broad smile. The world and its affairs still had an irrepressible zest and mirthful aspect to young Mr. Bliss.
"You're likely to hear some or-a-tory this afternoon, Mrs. Lane," he scoffed. "The district attorney is a Southerner, and he's going to spread himself when he makes his plea, you can believe. It's his chance to get talked about from San Francisco to Washington…. Of course it don't cut any ice what he says, but the papers will play it up large, and that's what they are after, the government. You see"—he waxed confidential—"the government's got to save its face somehow after all the talk and the dust they have raised. If they can secure a conviction,—oh, just a nominal fine (you know there is no prison penalty),—why, it'll be good campaign material this fall. So they fixed on the A. and P. as a shining mark for their shot. And you know there's a good deal of feeling, especially in this state, against railroads."
"I see!" In spite of herself Isabelle was amused at the naive assurance the young man had given her that nothing serious could happen to her husband,—not imprisonment! Mr. Bliss's point of view about the famous case was evidently that of the railroad office, tinged with a blithe sporting interest in a legal scrap. The ill-paid government attorneys trying the case were a lot of "light-weight mits," put up against the best "talent" in the country employed by the powerful corporation to protect itself; in short, a sure thing for the railroad in the final knockout if not in the first round.
"It was bad, their getting in those Pleasant Valley Company books," he remarked less exuberantly. "But it won't make any difference in the end. The papers have made the most of that evidence already."
"Why do you suppose the newspapers are so bitter against the road?"
"They aren't, the best of them; they know too much what's good for them. They just print the record of the trial. As for the sensational ones, you see it's this way,—they don't care, they haven't any convictions. It is just a matter of business for them. Slamming the corporations suits their readers. The people who buy most of the papers like to have the prosperous classes slammed. Most people are envious; they want the other fellow's roll,—isn't that so? They think they are as good as the best, and it makes 'em sick to see the other fellow in his automobile when they are earning fifteen or eighteen per! They don't stop to consider that it's brains that makes the diff."
"So it is merely envy that produces all this agitation?"
"I am not saying that the corporations are philanthropic institutions," Mr. Bliss continued didactically; "of course they aren't. They are out for business, and every man knows what that means. I suppose they do a good many tough things if they get the chance—same as their critics. What of it? Wouldn't the little fellow do the same thing, if he could,—had the chance? … What would this country be to-day without the corporations, the railroads? Without the Atlantic and Pacific, right here in St. Louis? And all the work of those men they are prosecuting and fining and trying to put into jail? Why, if the President had his way, he'd lock up every man that had enough sense and snap in him to do things, and he'd make this country like a Methodist camp meeting after the shouting is over! There's no sense to it."
Isabelle laughed at the young man's vigorous defence of "our" side. It seemed useless to attempt to pick flaws in his logic, and it would hardly become her as the wife of his "boss" to betray that she was not wholly convinced of his accuracy.
"Besides, why can't the government let bygones be bygones? Every one knows that the roads did some queer things in the old days. But why rake up old crimes and make a mess? I say let's have a clean slate and begin over…. But if they keep on legislating and howling against corporations, like some of these trust-busting state legislatures, we'll have a panic sure thing, and that will do the business for the reformers, won't it now?"