Alaska has great beds of finest anthracite coal, now being gobbled up by the Pennsylvania coal barons. GRAFT!
Alaska is covered by fine forests now being taken up by means of soldiers’ fractional script. GRAFT!
Alaska has the largest stamp mill on earth. The mine has produced over $22,000,000 in gold, more than three times the cost of the District. This mine is not timbered and there is an average of one man killed a day by caving. GRAFT!
Alaska has the only fur-seal islands in the world. These islands are leased to a big corporation. GRAFT!
Alaska has a navigable river twenty-eight hundred miles in length, a reservation at the mouth controls the harbor and permits are issued for warehouses to two big corporations only, so Alaskans again have to stand for GRAFT!
I could go on giving cases of graft for a month, but time is limited. An article by a well informed writer in Appleton’s Booklovers’ Magazine, entitled “The Looting of Alaska,” is well worth reading.
S. C. Le Baron, Smiley, Tex.
Three numbers of your Magazine received, for which I am truly thankful inasmuch as it stands for the principles which have been my political platform ever since the Greenback party was organised. It is only financial inability that kept me from becoming a subscriber at the start, for I felt very certain it would be a powerful educator, and the copies at hand prove my hopes fully realized. If it could be gotten into the hands of those who feel the need of a change in conditions but still can’t be made to understand the cause of these conditions, it would indeed be a powerful factor in the reform movement. The copies received are out doing missionary work; there is enough strong and conclusive argument in any one of them to set an unprejudiced mind to thinking seriously whether these things are so. I have been in this movement over thirty years, and having passed my eighty-first birthday, feel that I am not destined to work much longer, but when I see the circumstances which inevitably tend to an enthrallment of the masses, I feel like doing my best to avert the coming disaster. My hope lies in the integrity of an intelligent citizenship and it is through outspoken literature that intelligence can be acquired.