reform organization to give them authority. Lindsey, you understand, has made his life-work the founding of a children's court, which shall work by love and not by terror. Love of children—ah, yes, all scandal-bureaus know what that means! So they had a collection of affidavits accusing Lindsey of sodomy. They brought the charges while he was in the East; a reporter went to the Denver hotel where his young bride was staying, and when she refused to see the reporter, or to hear the charges against her husband, the reporter stood in the hallway and shouted the charges to her through the transom, and then went away and wrote up an interview!
Or perhaps the Scandal-Bureau will maintain for its foul purposes a special publication which is libel-proof; one of those "fly-by-night" sheets, whose editor-in-charge is an office-boy, and whose worldly possessions are a telephone address and three pieces of furniture. This was a part of their scheme in Denver. The publication was called—oh, most delicious allurement!—"Polly Pry"! I don't know if it is still published, but I saw copies of it during the coal-strike, and it was full of the cruelest libels concerning everybody who stood for the strikers.
I remember one full-page story about "Mother Jones," a white-haired old woman of eighty-two years, who was being held in jail without warrant or charge for several months, because she persisted in coming back to the strike-field every time she was deported. And what do you think they said about "Mother Jones"? In her early years she had been the keeper of a house of prostitution! They went into the most elaborate detail about it; they gave the names of people who knew about it, they gave the address of the house—and then they had their "kept" congressman, a man by the name of Kindel, to read this number of "Polly Pry" into the "Congressional Record"! So, of course, it was "privileged"; all the "kept" newspapers all over the state of Colorado and elsewhere might quote the story without danger of punishment! They might quote it, not from "Polly Pry," but from the "Congressional Record"!!
I took the trouble to ask "Mother Jones" about this story. It appears that in those early days she was a sewing woman; she earned a precarious living, and felt herself justified in working for anyone who would pay her. She did some sewing for a girl of the streets, and this girl died of tuberculosis, and the Catholic church refused her a burial service, and
