and he soon was keen on the scent. He became excited. He was on the track, he told Mr. Spreckels, of “something sensational.”
“Go ahead and get it!” Mr. Spreckels ordered.
“But, no”; the accountant said it was so big that he must first have a talk with his Chicago chief about it. The Chicago chief came; there were a few days of mystery, then the accountant and his chief both left the coast together.
“I never got that something big,” Mr. Spreckels says now, with a smile. He wasn t balked, however. He put other investigators to work and, though they found nothing “big,” they did find something small, very small. Besides general confusion, mismanagement, unearned dividends and inefficiency, there was graft. The directors got gas, electric light, gas ranges, coke, and other supplies free. That was their price, perhaps. That was the way the boss, Joe Crockett, bribed them, but the business boss had another political method of control. He gave places to relatives and friends of the directors and other influential men. The pay-roll was “padded,” like a city pay-roll, to make jobs for persons with pull.
How can business men despise politics so.
How can they pretend to dread the inefficiency, the pulls and the graft of public ownership of
