Drawing no salary, paying my own traveling expenses, and being made more or less ill by each of these long trips, I discontinued them. Editorials for a monthly magazine can be written down here in Georgia just about as well as in New York, and postage stamps cost less than railroad tickets.
Everything that I was allowed to do for the Magazine could be done just as well by mail as by personal presence.
As to refusing to make a final trip to seek “an amicable adjustment,” I wrote to DeFrance that the proposition referred to already WAS MY LAST WORD, and that there was no use in my coming to New York to say it again. Col. Mann could accept or reject—I was not going there to listen to any more of his coaxing, bluffing and lies.
Besides, to tell the whole truth, I was not sorry that the time had come when I could cut loose from this fat rascal. After I had worked on and on; after he had broken promise upon promise; after he had sued the Magazine for $60,000 and got an execution against it; after he had shown that he wanted me to continue indefinitely to do ten times as much work as the contract called for, and to never have any share in the reward that might be reaped from my labors; after he had broken the contract by dismissing my son from a position which was my personal appointment; after he had rushed into the newspapers and confirmed my suspicion of his villainous purpose by revealing his utter and shameless disregard for his contracts, THEN my conscience and my judgment concurred in the decision to cut loose from the New York concern and START A MAGAZINE OF MY OWN.
***
Not a second thought have I given to the loss of the $9,000. But THAT wasn’t all. Col. Mann assailed me. The odium of a catastrophe which was the result of his own folly, faithlessness and lack of honor, he tried to cast upon me. In his efforts to escape universal contempt, he lied like a bulletin.
Betrayed by one whom I selected as my personal representative in the office and whom I advanced from Circulation Clerk to Business Manager; accused of a mismanagement which I endeavored in vain to correct; held up to public criticism for mistreatment of employes when I had never uttered an unkind word to a single one of them, high or low, during the whole time of my service, and when I had never made a change in the force that was not sanctioned in advance, by Colonel Mann himself, I now feel that burning sense of the injustice and outrage which any other man of spirit would feel under the same circumstances.
***
With an effrontery which nothing could surpass, the two men who have seized my magazine on the half and half plan are mailing out a circular letter begging Reformers to take shares in the stock of the new Company.
This circular carries Deception on its very face. It purports to hail from “2 West 40th Street.”