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Graft Investigations

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Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Apr 29, 1908

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 34, No. 18.

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Graft Investigations.

By T.

CHICAGO is now having a "graft investigation," and it is said that the mouths of important witnesses are being sealed because of mysterious threats of death that are coming to them. The investigations involve the city water bureau, and when witnesses were brought before the Civil Service Board, no promises of immunity could induce them to repeat the things they had told the superintendent of the bureau. The boldness in crime is getting to be something terrible. Our cities seem to be held in the grasp of men who are sufficiently numerous to defy justice before the courts.
The graft investigations in Chicago are being held up and thwarted by threats of death to the witnesses who had started in on a course of generally informing on what they knew to be going on. But in San Francisco, whose grafting has become world famous, it is different. The ablest attorneys have been working on the graft cases there for considerably over a year, and have secured several convictions. But these convictions have to be fought for again in one court after another, and on one technicality after another until it begins to look as tho no indictments against those accused of the worst kind of corruption and dishonesty can be made to stand. The evidence of guilt is not contested so much. But first one technical point and then another is brought up, and month after month drags by, and nothing definite is accomplished.
These grafters have so entrenched themselves that when they are touched anywhere there is always some big business interest that will be made to suffer financially, and so they have the powerful support of this business concern or that to bring influences to bear to keep them from meeting the justice that properly belongs to them. These conditions are producing a grave danger in these times, and men should seriously consider what the outcome of it must surely be. T.