public utilities, when they know that this San Francisco Gas Company is a typical example of “private” or business management of this class of business ? And Mr. Spreckels didn’t find out for whom and for what Joe Crockett wanted to run the company; but the rest of us have. We learned in the life insurance and railroad investigations what that “ something big” is.
Mr. Spreckels was busy. He reported to that board of directors what he had discovered, and he suggested that they cut out all this “dry rot” — the financial term for corruption. There was a scene. There was just such a howl at this reform in business as there is in politics, and more hypocrisy. Those old directors were in- digant. To think that they, gentlemen, men of business standing and years of experience, were to be insulted and dictated to by a boy of twenty-eight! He should learn that he couldn’t dominate them. They were having troubles enough from one Spreckels already; they wouldn’t put up with another “in their midst.”
But that boy of twenty-eight was, indeed, a Spreckels. Independent, wilful, he was sure of the end. He had the facts. He appealed again to the stockholders, who, like him, had been allowing themselves to be voted by “the party
