command and all that I could hire. I cartooned him in stripes. I de-
scribed him on the way to the penitentiary at San Quentin.
I was vindictive, unscrupulous, savage. I went to Washington and enlisted Heney in the fight. William J. Burns came and I persuaded Spreckles to help us. At last, after years of a man-hunting and man- hating debauch, Ruef became what I had longed and dreamed that he might become a convict.
Then I said to myself: "You've got him. He's in stripes. He is help- less, beaten, chained. You've won. How do you like your victory? How do you enjoy the picture you have painted? Every savage in- stinct in your nature is expressed in the canvas."
Well, my soul revolted. I thought over my own life, the many un- worthy things I have done to others, the injustice, the wrongs, I have been guilty of, the human hearts I have wantonly hurt, the sorrow I have caused, the half truths I have told, the mitigating truths I have withheld, the lies I have allowed to go undenied. I see myself now stripped of all sham and pretense and self-righteousness, holding the key to another man's cell. If society will let me, I want to unlock that barred door and for the rest of my life try to get nearer the spirit of Christ.
In a letter to the writer of this book, Mr. Older enlarged still further upon this change :
I thought when I wrote the letter, and I think now, that we all ap- proached the graft situation in the wrong spirit. We believed that there was only one way to put an end to municipal corruption and that was by discovering legal evidence against the grafters, indict them, try them in the courts, convict them and send them to the penitentiary. We did not know we were dealing with a disease and that there was no more occasion for hatred and denunciation than there would have been if the city had become infected with a contagious malady, and we had led a crusade to eliminate it. But in those days none of us had any doubt that the jail was the only cure. That was because we had no background of human experience. We believed that men were either definitely good or definitely bad, and that men deliberately decided to be either good or bad, j ust as a young man would choose a career. So we proceeded on that theory and expended vast sums of money, time, and energy in trying to put the grafters in prison. It happened that the men who had been buy- ing privileges of Schmitz and Ruef were wealthy, and being wealthy were influential, highly respected, and belonged to our most exclusive social circles. Naturally, they did n't relish the idea of wearing stripes in a penitentiary. So they fought back hard and the conflict developed into a bitter war which lasted several years.
If we had used the money, time, and energy in making a quiet in- vestigation of the graft in our city, and had not stopped as soon as we
