Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A MILLION DOLLAR BRIBE. Wherein William Bradley offers Ned his ideas of the kind of moral backbone that is entitled to flowers, speaks his mind on the subject of official temptations and tells how "Old Cal" Peavey acquitted himself under the offer of a million dollar bribe. CHAPTER III. A MILLION DOLLAR BRIBE. Brokenstraw Ranch, , ig—. Dear Ned:— No doubt the new Governor is all of the moral athlete you set him up to be; but somehow I can't quite go into spasms of enthusiasm over the chief executive of a great state who allows his friends to cackle like a bevy of Shanghai pullets simply because he has managed to turn down a temptation that a Chicago alderman would scorn. Of course it was a very virtuous performance on the Governor's part; but he would pull heavier on my admiration if he hadn't allowed you fellows to draw the inference that he had felt any temptation to be resisted. When a man admits to himself that he is tempted he marks down his own moral backbone about twenty per cent.; and when he brags that he didn't yield to the temptation he unconsciously puts himself on the bargaincounter and classes himself along with the unsold goods in stock. At least that's the way a good many discriminating people, who have had their eye-teeth cut, are inclined to look at the matter. In all my recollection, I can recall just one man who could afford to admit, without cheapening his own character, that he was subjected to a downright temptation—but he didn't admit it! And when the story leaked out, after his death, there wasn't a man in the state who didn't take off his hat to the moral stamina that the Governor had shown. That little incident made the eulogies of the pulpits and the newspapers look cheap. It happened while you were kicking a pigskin at Princeto...