and he did turn it. Men were convinced. The trial of the Senator was a spectacle for the whole nation. It was hard fought, but Heney and his staff of assistants, and Bums, the detective, had made a case that had not a loophole in it. Heney himself conducted the prosecution like a flame, so passionate was he, so sure and inexorable, and the elaboration of the evidence was like a conflagration. That Oregon jury convicted the Oregon Senator and—John Mitchell died.
And John A. McCall, the president of the New York Life Insurance Company, died; and A. J. Cassatt, of the Pennsylvania Railroad; and James W. Alexander, vice-president of the Equitable Assurance Company, lost his mind. There is something terrible about justice—when it is unexpected. Men say in Oregon that Mitchell was not so bad. He played the game according to the rules learned in life, and he had won, as others had, so many other of our successful men. He had made much money, been honored, even loved. The law slept and there was no justice. The system reigned.
Suddenly this man, Francis J. Heney, came along with his sense of duty. He awakened the law and did justice to Mitchell, who was no worse than others. He did justice also to Pierce Mays, whose friends protest that he is naturally a good man; Mays played the game and he is in prison. You don't often hear his neighbors speak so well of a man as his constituents speak of Congressman Williamson. He did only what everybody says "everybody did" in Oregon and he stands convicted of a felony. And so with many of the leading citizens of that state. They are not criminals yet they are under indictment, sentence, or notorious suspicion, and if Heney had the time and power he could go with the evidence already in hand to Washington, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and other states and "get "men who have become rich and respected in the land business. Is it any wonder the Northwest is aghast at the terrible results of justice done for once to a few men in Oregon?
If that same justice were certain always hereafter to be done to all guilty men in Oregon and everywhere else, these victims of Heney's unusual sense of duty might serve as examples. But Heney is about through with Oregon; Bristol, his successor, is not well backed up; and the system stands. Only the political head of it is gone, and Senator Fulton, the candidate for leadership of the system there, while not so popular, is quite as "bad" as Senator Mitchell was. In the course of the fight over Bristol, Heney sent to the President certain evidence (outlawed and therefore useless in court except in a libel suit) which shows that Fulton is a corruptionist. But corruption was the custom in Oregon. Heney exposed, he did not break up the System. He says that all of the public lands stolen by all the frauds he proved or ever heard of are a "bagatelle" compared to the areas of timber, coal and grazing lands handed over regularly to big corruptionists —individuals, railroads and other corporations—by Congress in legislation, which while not criminal is as corrupt and more dangerous than stealing. For this "lawful business" is the result, and the absolute proof, of the development of the system of corruption to a point where the national legislature represents without bribery not all, but a few of the people; not justice, but "legitimate grafts." And these grafts are so grand, and so sympathetic with small grafts that other men will take again the small chance Mitchell took, and Mays and Williamson and Puter, to succeed—in Oregon and in Idaho and in California, where the grand grafts are land grafts. In other states, other grafts, but the system is the same.
Either "Justice must be," as Heney said when he was a school-teacher, "swift, sure and inexorable;" or, as he says now, in California, we must deliver men from temptation. The purpose of his life and the use of his example is to try out the Law. And he can see that if the Law cannot do the job, the people at the polls must, and he says they will, change the System which, at present, pays bad men big and good men—very, very little.
(Mr. Steffens's article next month will describe Heney's wonderful work in San Francisco.)
