with a smile: "We backed the wrong horse." The truth was, he had backed the horse of gold, the horse that came to his office loaded down with full-page advertisements of packing-house products.
"Collier's" calls itself "The National Weekly," and has obtained a reputation as a liberal organ, upon the strength of several useful campaigns. It attacked spiritualist fakers and land-fraud grafters; also it attacked dishonest medical advertising. It could do this, having arrived at the stage of security where it counts upon full-page advertisements of automobiles and packing-house products. But when it was a question of attacking packing-house advertisements—then what a difference!
Robert J. Collier was a gentleman and a "good fellow"; but he was a child of his world, and his world was a rotten one, a "second generation" of idle rich spendthrifts. The running of his magazine "on a personal basis" amounted to this: a young writer would catch the public fancy, and Robbie would send for him, as he sent for me; if he proved to be a possible person—that is, if he came to dinner in a dress-suit, and didn't discuss the socialization of "Collier's Weekly"—Robbie would take him up and introduce him to his "set," and the young writer would have a perpetual market for his stories at a thousand dollars per story; he would be invited to country-house parties, he would motor and play golf and polo, and flirt with elegant young society ladies, and spend his afternoons loafing in the Hoffman House bar. I could name not one but a dozen young writers and illustrators to whom I have seen that happen. In the beginning they wrote about America, in the end they wrote about the "smart set" of Fifth Avenue and Long Island. In their personal life they became tipplers and cafe celebrities; in their intellectual life they became bitter cynics; into their writings you saw creeping year by year the subtle poison of sexual excess—until at last they became too far gone for "Collier's" to tolerate any longer, and went over to the "Cosmopolitan," which takes them no matter how far gone they are.
And now young Collier is dead, and the magazine to which for a time he gave his generous spirit has become an instrument of reaction pure and simple. It opposed and ridiculed President Wilson's peace policies; it called the world to war against the working-class of Russia; it is now calling for
