Part 11

If this be denied, Roosevelt is challenged to answer if it was not the railroad trust that furnished him gratuitously with the special trains that bore him in royal splendor over all the railways of the nation. He is challenged to publish the list of contributors to his political sewer funds, amounting to millions of dollars, and freely used to buy the votes that made him president.

Did, or did not, the men known as trust magnates put up this boodle? Boodle drawn from the veins of labor?

Will Mr. Roosevelt deny it?

Did he not know at the time that his man Cortelyou was holding up the trusts for all they would "cough up" for his election?

Will he dare plead ignorance to intelligent persons as to who put up the money that debauched the voters of the nation?

It is true that a spasm of virtuous indignation seized him when he found that the trusts had slipped the lucre into his slush funds when he was not looking, but this was only after he saw the people looking behind the curtain. Then he bounded to the foot-lights and denounced Alton B. Parker as a liar for charging that the trusts were furnishing the boodle to make him president, but no man not feeble-minded was deceived as to who was the liar.

Read the Washington press dispatch in the Kansas City Journal of April 4th: "It was declared in banking circles that light could be shed on the question of campaign contributions in 1904 if the books of the national Republican committee were thrown open."

The books will not be thrown open. Roosevelt will not allow it; he knows they contain the damning evidence of his guilt.

The case is clearly stated in the platform of the Democratic state convention of Missouri, adopted in 1906, which reads as follows:

"We believe Theodore Roosevelt insincere. Pretending to inveigh against the crimes of trusts and corporations, he openly defended Paul Morton, when, as manager of the Santa Fe railroad, he was compelled to confess enormous rebates to the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. It was Roosevelt who advanced the pernicious doctrine that you must punish the corporation, not its officials who cause it to commit crime. It was Roosevelt who denounced large campaign contributions, while his secretary of commerce and labor was fleecing the corporations out of one of the biggest slush funds ever known in the history of American politics."

President Roosevelt may shout "liar" until he turns as black in the face as are the cracksmen at heart who burglarized the safes of the New York insurance companies to land him in the White House, while he was toying with the names of "Jimmy" Hyde and Chauncey Depew as pawns in the corrupt game, but the "damned spot" will not out until the whole truth is known and the whole crime expiated.

The publication of the Roosevelt-Harriman correspondence places the president in his true colors before the American people. It explains his hot haste in condemning Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone to the gallows and sending Taft to Idaho to assure the smelter trust and warn the protesting people that the kidnaping of the workingmen was sanctioned by the White House and would have the support of the national administration.

A more shameful perversion of public power never blackened the pages of history.

This national scandal shows up the president's two-faced character so clearly and convincingly that it leaves not so much as a pin-hole for escape. It is a damning indictment of not only the president, but the whole brood of plutocrats, promoters and grafting politicians who have been looting this nation for years.

There is one among these illuminating epistles which I want to burn in the minds of the working class dupes who have been bowing in the dust before this blustering bully of the White House:

"Personal.

"October 1, 1904.--My Dear Mr. Harriman: A suggestion has come to me in a round-about way that you do not think it wise to come to see me in these closing weeks of the campaign, but that you are reluctant to refuse, inasmuch as I have asked you. Now, my dear sir, you and I are practical men, and you are on the ground and know the conditions better than I do.

"If you think there is any danger of your visit to me causing trouble, or if you think there is nothing special I should be informed about, or any matter in which I could give aid, why, of course, give up the visit for the time being, and then, a few weeks hence, before I write my message, I shall get you to come down to discuss certain government matters not connected with the campaign. With great regards, sincerely yours,

(Signed) "THEODORE ROOSEVELT."

Does not this brand the president with the duplicity of a Tweed and the cunning of a Quay?

Would a president who is honest with the people clandestinely consort with the villain he characterizes as a liar and all that is vicious?

The disclosures made in the secret correspondence strip the president of the last shred of deception with which to cloak his perfidy. The mask is lifted and the exposure is complete. It is in the president's own handwriting in a letter to Harriman that would never have seen the light had not circumstances forced it upon the attention of a betrayed people. It is adroitly phrased, but its meaning is not in doubt. He knew Harriman then as he knows him now; wanted his boodle and insinuatingly coaxed him to sneak to the White House when no one was looking, and only after he was discovered did he denounce Harriman as a liar and fall into his usual fit of moral epilepsy.

From now on there will be a sharp decline in the stock of Theodore Roosevelt. The capitalist papers may continue to boom him as the only savior and his corps of press agents at the White House may continue to grind out three-column stories about the awful conspiracy of his "trusty" friends to ruin him, but his bubble is pricked and the cheap glory in which he reveled is departing forever.

The people have been sadly deceived for a time, but the march of events is opening their eyes.

Only the very ignorant and foolish believe that a president who has surrounded himself with Wall Street darlings as cabinet ministers has any serious designs on the trusts.

The Ryan, Root and Roosevelt combination is ideal. It speaks for itself, and with such shining lights as Taft, Cortelyou, Knox and Paul Morton surrounding it, all lingering doubt is removed, and the fools' paradise is in the full blaze of its glory.

Space will not permit a review of the personnel of the president's official family, at least two of whom, had the law been enforced, would now be in penitentiary.

The story of President Roosevelt and Paul Morton, if truthfully told, would make a luminous chapter in railroad rascality and political jobbery. It was to this notorious strike-breaker and self-confessed criminal that Roosevelt issued a bill of moral rectitude long as Pope's essay that landed him into the eighty-thousand-dollars-a-year insurance graft he now holds down.