Читать книгу Twenty Years a Detective in the Wickedest City in the World - Clifton R. Wooldridge - Страница 34

Within the last few years names that have stood honored for a generation in financial, political and social life have been dragged down from high places perhaps as never before in America. The court of King Graft has been attacked and threatened as never before, and with greater showing. There is war in the open against this pretender king, and his legions everywhere are retiring behind their breastworks, broken but not defeated.

Graft in its nakedness, has been exposed and the people are aroused, fearing that the grafter has sucked the life blood of the republic.

What they have seen is but a glimpse of real conditions—the ulcer spots where the rottenness beneath has broken through—but they have seen enough to realize the peril and attack it. While the conditions revealed are astounding and alarming, they are signs of improvement.

The nation is better than it was a decade ago, since tens of thousands of grafters have been stamped out, since the leaders of the greatest grafts of the land have been exposed to the withering light of contempt of all decent Americans.