Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/304

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to this bigger, finer task. And he was absorbed for a while. It was an inspiring spectacle, that of those fifty leading men leading a whole city of men and women in the work for the common good. But Spreckels was the first to see that the grafters smelt the graft and that the fifty, reduced to forty, caught the smell, whiffed, and dashed all together — low politicians, high financiers, and dignified attorneys — for the graft. Plerrin was on hand; Harriman came flying to the rescue and —to get his rails farther into the city. Calhoun came out to get, while the city was down, the franchise held up before, but arranged for, a nd — he got it. But Rudolph Spreckels saw now that the fight wasn’t with Mr. Calhoun; and neither was it with Schmitz and Ruef. It was with some sort of a big, general condition. So he went back to the big, general war he had planned with Heney and Burns before the earthquake; before that franchise for Calhoun came up — his plan as outlined years before to his friends at lunch, the day Ruef offered to lend him Organized Labour to knock out Organized Capital and seize a bond issue. Rudolph Spreckels went on with his plan for such an investigation and fight of the corruption in San Francisco as he had made and won in San Francisco gas.