There was the gigantic Racing Trust. It owned the legislatures in every state in which it did business; it even owned some of the big newspapers, and made public opinion⁠—there was no power in the land that could oppose it unless, perhaps, it were the Poolroom Trust. It built magnificent racing parks all over the country, and by means of enormous purses it lured the people to come, and then it organized a gigantic shell-game, whereby it plundered them of hundreds of millions of dollars every year. Horseracing had once been a sport, but nowadays it was a business; a horse could be “doped” and doctored, undertrained or overtrained; it could be made to fall at any moment⁠—or its gait could be broken by lashing it with the whip, which all the spectators would take to be a desperate effort to keep it in the lead. There were scores of such tricks; and sometimes it was the owners who played them and made fortunes, sometimes it was the jockeys and trainers, sometimes it was outsiders, who bribed them⁠—but most of the time it was the chiefs of the trust. Now, for instance, they were having winter-racing in New Orleans, and a syndicate was laying out each day’s programme in advance, and its agents in all the Northern cities were “milking” the poolrooms.