press was supplied with
news--and often and well they had used this control, and surprisingly
cautious had they been not so to abuse it that the editors and the public
would become suspicious. When my war was at its height, when I was
beginning to congratulate myself that the huge magazines of "The Seven"
were empty almost to the point at which they must sue for peace on my own
terms, all in four days forty-three of my sixty-seven newspapers--and they
the most important--notified me that they would no longer carry out their
contracts to publish my daily letter. They gave as their reason, not the
real one, fear of "The Seven," but fear that I would involve them in
ruinous libel suits. I who had _legal_ proof for every statement I
made; I who was always careful to understate! Next, one press association
after another ceased to send out my letter as news, though they had been
doing so regularly for months. The public had grown tired of the
"sensation," they said.

I countered with a telegram to one or more newspapers in every city and
large town in the United States:

"'The Seven' are trying to cut the wires between the truth and the public.
If you wish my daily letter, telegraph me direct and I will send it at my
expense."

The response should have warned "The Seven." But it did not. Under their
orders the telegraph companies refused to transmit the letter. I got an
injunction. It was obeyed in typical, corrupt corporation fashion--they
sent my matter, but so garbled that it was unintelligible. I appealed to
the courts. In vain.

To me, it was clear as sun in cloudless noonday sky that there could be but
one result of this insolent and despotic denial of my rights and the rights
of the people, this public confession of the truth of my charges. I turned
everything salable or mortgageable into cash, locked the cash up in my
private vaults, and waited for the cataclysm.

Thursday--Friday--Saturday. Apparently all was tranquil; apparently the
people accepted the Wall Street theory that I was an "exploded sensation."
"The Seven" began to preen themselves; the strain upon them to maintain
prices, if no less than for three months past, was not notably greater; the
crisis would pass, I and my exposures would be forgotten, the routine of
reaping the harvests and leaving only the gleanings for the sowers would
soon be placidly resumed.

Sunday. Roebuck, taken ill as he was passing the basket in the church of
which he was th