Show NOTHING MORALLY WRONG The St Louis boofllcrs who bound themselves together with a big oath as a band of boy buccaneers after the lurid style of the dime novel must have been a queer lot The squealer who last week told all about It had the singular audacity to say that We did not look upon what we did as a serious crime as It had gone on so long without with-out Interruption that lit was not re garded by those who participated In It las l-as morally wrong Those scoundrels were engaged In plundering the public treasury In every conceivable manner They pillaged all public contracts they had their rakeoff on all public works done by authority of the city they took bribes they sold public franchises they robbed right and left allowing no dollar to get out of sight And yet they didnt sea In It all anything morally wrong This adds to the presumption that those looters had been raised on dime novels and The Pirates Pi-rates Own Book and such like literature liter-ature Probably if I they had felt it to be necessary to kill a few men In order to carry out their schemes of loot none of the crowd could have seen anything morally wrong In that also It would have been too small a matter to stir up their moral sense In that view oft of-t the secret oath which they all look to stand together must not be taken us conscious knowledge that they were engaged In rascality and robbery but only as showing that they were literally liter-ally following the precedents they had rend In the books with which evidently hey were familiar They bound themselves them-selves together not that they were enraged en-raged In anything they thought to he vrong but because Bloody Dick the Terror of the Plains had bound his adherent ad-herent with such an oath It Is gratifying grat-ifying to get at the real worklnga of the minds of that precious lot of rogues |