quote the last stanza, in which the victim is forbidden to kill himself:
Pregnant with possibilities of crime,
And full of felons for all coming time,
Your blood's too precious to be lightly spilt
In testimony to a venial guilt.
Live to get whelpage and preserve a name
No praise can sweeten and no lie unshame.
Live to fulfill the vision that I see
Down the dim vistas of the time to be:
A dream of clattering beaks and burning eyes
Of hungry ravens glooming all the skies;
A dream of gleaming teeth and fetid breath
Of jackals wrangling at the feast of death;
A dream of broken necks and swollen tongues—
The whole world's gibbets loaded with de Youngs!
Let us go to Denver, where there lives another fighter and teller of truth, Ben Lindsey. I have made you acquainted with the "Denver Post," and with one of its owners, Mr. F. G. Bonfils, who made his "pile" as a lottery-promoter, and went into partnership with another man. Now let Judge Lindsey introduce us to this other man:
The "Post" was then as independent as a highwayman. One of its
proprietors, H. H. Tammen, had begun life as a bar-keeper, and he
would himself relate how he had made money by robbing his employer.
"When I took in a dollar," Tammen said, "I tossed it up—and if it
stuck to the ceiling, it went to the boss." He had a frank way of
making his vices engaging by the honesty with which he confessed
them; and he had boasted to me of the amount of money the newspaper
made by charging its victims for suppressing news-stories of a
scandalous nature in which they were involved. He admitted that he
supported me merely because it was "the popular thing to do"—it
"helped circulation." I knew it was a very precarious support, although
the editorial writer, Paul Thieman, seemed to me an honest and public-spirited
young man.
Or come to Kansas City, where William Salisbury is working
on the "Times." There is a fight on with the gas companies,
which have formed a trust and doubled the price of
gas. A solitary alderman named Smith has spoken against
the ordinance.
When I returned to the "Times" office that night the city editor
came up to my desk, sat down, and said, confidentially: "We'll have
to print a favorable story on this consolidation. I wouldn't give much
space to that man Smith's remarks. I don't know what the gas people
