but he was the only responsible party on the bond of one grafter, so Frank made Ben pay. Another suit was against his law partner whom he had appointed a chancellor of the university. The law allowed the chancellors $10 a meeting, but the custom was to take $50 a month besides. "My partner was a good man," Heney says, "churchman and all that, but he loved money." He "followed the custom," and Heney made him pay back the money. They all followed the custom, and Heney, having started suits against them all and carried the first of the cases through all appeals up to the United States Supreme Court, resigned.
When the man Governor Hughes appointed in his place sent a deputy into court to dismiss the pending suits, Heney went off in a rage to Washington to demand the removal of Hughes. His charges were pretty stiff, but he did not succeed.
"Cleveland did remove Hughes," Heney told me with a steady look out of his eyes, "but not then and not for grafting." Hughes was retired a year or so later for giving honest expression to his honest conviction on the silver question. It was a rude awakening. Heney had dreamed of a United States Senator.
Democratic Arizona expected to become a state under this Democratic President and Congress and Heney, by helping to fit her for statehood, hoped to be one of the first two senators.
"But then," he cackled, "Arizona wasn't admitted. She wasn't fit, but that wasn't against her. President Cleveland didn't want any more Silver Democrats in the Senate."
Frank Heney, the fighter, was beaten. He decided to quit not only politics but the territory, and he did leave Arizona. And he thought he had left politics behind him. But he didn't quit fighting; he couldn't; he can't. He has fought since, and won, in Oregon; and we shall see how. And, as we shall see, he is fighting better still now in San Francisco. Why did Arizona beat him so badly?
"I didn't know," he answers, "and I don't know that I know now, but I know more than I knew when I left the territory. I blamed Hughes then. So long as he was honest, all the fellows were honest. The spirit of our administration was fine till the leader began to graft. Then there was a graft stampede. But how is a weak man like Hughes to be blamed when a banker beside him and a lot of best citizens behind and all around him were tempting him to eat an apple so that they could get whole orchards. I can see it now. Didn't they try me. Herrin (General Counsel for the Southern Pacific) didn't want me for an attorney when I was fighting for right things, but when I became Attorney General of the territory he offered me a railroad retainer. I didn't know why then, but I'd have found out. We were for economy. We should soon have looked into taxes, and when I had seen what the railroads and mines didn't pay, I think I'd have understood—even if I had never gone to Oregon or come back here to California. For—territories, states and cities, they're all alike.
"No, it's not a mere matter of good men and bad men. I suppose I seem always to be trying to put crooks in jail, and I am, but I know that that won't straighten the crookedness. That's what I used to think. Now I realize that my fight isn't against men but a system, and my hope is that the evidence I produce of crime may help good men and women to see that there are certain causes of all this corruption of ours, causes which they must remove if we are ever to achieve good government in Arizona, Oregon, California—the United States."
(The next article by Mr. Steffens will tell the remarkable story of how Burns, the Secret Service detective, discovered the land frauds. The trail leads through one of the departments in Washington out into California and Oregon. The article is illuminating in its facts and its import.)
