The defendant, as publisher of a certain weekly newspaper at Warrensburg, Mo., called the Standard-Herald, on the 19th of June, 1903, published in said paper the following article: When a citizen of Missouri stops long enough to think of the condition of affairs in his state, it is enough to chill his blood. A grand jury in Cole county has just found indictments against four members of the highest lawmaking body in the state, and the St. Louis grand jury has heard evidence within the past few months that, if it had the necessary jurisdiction, would have indicted many other members of the State Senate.
The Missouri citizen has also seen the Cole county grand jury dissolved before the work mapped out for it was hardly begun, on the advice of the Attorney General of the state. They also see the Chief Executive sitting passively at his office in the Statehouse, not making a move to bring to justice the men who have been proven guilty of boodling in the Missouri Legislature by the St. Louis grand jury, but over whom the authorities of that city have no jurisdiction. And now, as the capsheaf of all this corruption in high places, the Supreme Court has, at the whipcrack of the Missouri Pacific Railroad, sold its soul to the corporations, and allowed Rube Oglesby to drag his wrecked frame through this life without even the pitiful remuneration of a few paltry dollars. Learned men of the law say that Rube Oglesby had the best damage suit against a corporation ever taken to the Supreme Court. This very tribunal, after reading the evidence and hearing the arguments of the attorneys, rendered a decision sustaining the judgment of the lower court, which decision was concurred in by six of the seven members of the court. This is usually the end of such cases, and the decision of a Supreme Court, once made, usually stands. But not so in the Oglesby case.
Three times was this case, at the request of the railway attorneys, opened for rehearing, and three times was the judgment of the lower court sustained. But during this time, which extended over a period of several years, the legal department of this great corporation was not the only department which was busy in circumventing the defeat of the Oglesby case. The political department was very, very busy. Each election has seen the hoisting of a railway attorney to the Supreme Bench, and, when that body was to the satisfaction of the Missouri Pacific, the onslaught to kill the Oglesby case began. A motion for a rehearing was granted, and at the hearing of the case it was reversed on an error in record of the trial court, and was sent back for retrial. That was in the early part of the year 1902. The case was tried in Sedalia before Circuit Judge Longan, one of the ablest jurists in the state, and we have been informed that no error was allowed to creep into the record at the second trial. Again the jury rendered judgment in favor of Oglesby for $15,000, and again the case was appealed to the Supreme Court. An election was coming on, and the railroad needed yet another man to beat the Oglesby case.
The Democratic nominating convention was kind, and furnished him, in the person of Fox. The railroad, backed by four judges on the bench, allowed the case to come up for final hearing, and Monday the decision was handed down, reversed and not remanded for retrial. The victory of the railroad has been complete, and the corruption of the Supreme Court has been thorough. It has reversed and stultified itself in this case until no sane man can have any other opinion but that the judges who concurred in the opinion dismissing the Oglesby case have been bought in the interest of the railroad. What hope have the ordinary citizens of Missouri for justice and equitable laws in bodies where such open venality is practiced? And how long will they stand it? The corporations have long owned the Legislature, now they own the Supreme Court, and the citizen who applies to either for justice against the corporation gets nothing. Rube Oglesby and his attorney, Mr. O. L. Houts, have made a strong fight for justice. They have not got it. The quivering limb that Rube left beneath the rotton freight car on Independence Hill, and his blood that stained the right of way of the soulless corporation, have been buried beneath the wise legal verbiage of a venal court, and the wheels of the Juggernaut will continue to grind out men’s lives, and a crooked court will continue to refuse them and their relatives damages, until the time comes when Missourians, irrespective of politics, rise up in their might and slay at the ballot box the corporation-bought lawmakers of the state.
