to the individual man. If he had been the one and
only failure of the Civil Service workers, he could have accused
himself and taken the Senator's advice to "chuck" the fool-theory of
men in public service fighting for right; but he was only one of a
multitude of men, paid public money to prevent the looting of public
property; whose work was blocked, non-suited, pigeon-holed, bluffed,
hampered, or, worst of all, carried up to investigating committees
whose sole purpose was to conceal and wear the public out with
interminable wrangles over technicalities that were irrelevant.

Better men than he had fought doggedly only to be downed. There was
the Land Office man in Oregon dismissed for the slip of a wrong entry
in his field book because he had quite unintentionally unearthed the
frauds of a member of the land-loot ring who happened to be a
congressman. There was the Federal attorney hounded from his home city
because he prosecuted bribe-givers and objected to being shot while on
duty in the court room. There was that other Federal Law man, shot at
the shaft of a coal mine stolen from public lands. There was the Army
Engineer demoted from his life work because he fought for a free harbor
for a great city and offended the railroad fighting to keep that harbor
closed. There were the two Forest Service men dismissed for giving
facts to the public. Then, there was the Alaska Case--Wayland laughed;
and the laugh was a little bitter. Surely the crowning farce of all:
that had gone up easily to investigation with a blare of trumpets and a
flare of news headlines. That was the easiest of all.

It made good politics, yet--it was so involved in technicalities, while
it offered a bit of by-play to the gallery, that there had never from
the first, even for the fraction of an instant, been the faintest hope
of anything but confusion emerging from the investigation; but it
played into the game without hurting anybody. If they had really
wanted to investigate, why didn't they take a case in which there were
no technicalities of law, the looted red-lands of California, for
instance; or the half-million of timber openly stolen each year for a
certain smelting ring; or the two thousand acres of coal where Smelter
City itself was built; or the shooting of the Federal Law Officer down
at that other coal mine? These cases involved no "twilight zone" of
dispute as to law, in which the "system" and the "ring" could hide.
Every Go