Which threat was carried out to the letter.  First came a campaign among the advertisers of the magazine, which lost an income of thousands of dollars a month, almost over night.  And then came a campaign among the banks—­the magazine could not get credit.  Anyone familiar with the publishing business will understand that a magazine which is growing rapidly has to have advances to meet each month’s business.  Hampton undertook to raise the money by selling stock; whereupon a spy was introduced into his office as bookkeeper, his list of subscribers was stolen, and a campaign was begun to destroy their confidence.

It happened that I was in Hampton’s office in the summer of 1911, when the crisis came.  Money had to be had to pay for a huge new edition; and upon a property worth two millions of dollars, with endorsements worth as much again, it was impossible to borrow thirty thousand dollars in the city of New York.  Bankers, personal friends of the publisher, stated quite openly that word had gone out that any one who loaned money to him would be “broken”.  I myself sent telegrams to everyone I knew who might by any chance be able to help; but there was no help, and Hampton retired without a dollar to his name, and the magazine was sold under the hammer to a concern which immediately wrecked it and discontinued publication.

#The Industrial Shelley#

Such was the fate of an editor who opposed the “New Haven”.  And now, what of those editors who supported it?  Turn to “The Outlook, a Weekly Journal of Current Events,” edited by Lyman Abbott—­the issue of Dec. 25th, nineteen hundred and nine years after Christ came down to bring peace on earth and good-will toward Wall Street.  You will there find an article by Sylvester Baxter entitled “The Upbuilding of a Great Railroad.”  It is the familiar “slush” article which we professional writers learn to know at a glance.  “Prodigious”, Mr. Baxter tells us, has been the progress of the New Haven; this was “a masterstroke”, that was “characteristically sagacious”.  The road had made “prodigious expenditures”, and to a noble end:  “Transportation efficiency epitomizes the broad aim that animated these expenditures and other constructive activities.”  There are photographs of bridges and stations—­“vast terminal improvements”, “a masterpiece of modern engineering”, “the highest, greatest and most architectural of bridges”.  Of the official under whom these miracles were being wrought—­President Mellen—­we read:  “Nervously organized, of delicate sensibility, impulsive in utterance, yet with an extraordinarily convincing power for vividly logical presentation.”  An industrial Shelley, or a Milton, you perceive; and all this prodigious genius poured out for the general welfare!  “To study out the sort of transportation service best adapted to these ends, and then to provide it in the most efficient form possible, that is the life-task that President Mellen has set himself.”