ded; "but who
will be in this besides ourselves?"

"Every one of us--Stillman, Daly, Olcott, Flower, Morgan, all who can be
of use to us will have to be let in on some of the ground floors. The
foundation profits, as we agreed under the old plan, will be twenty-five
per cent. to you, seventy-five per cent. to us. After that we will
jointly take care of those we let in. Is that all right?"

When Henry H. Rogers sets out to batter down an antagonist he is as
fierce as an eagle foraging for her young; victorious, he is as amiable
and generous as a salesman who has unloaded on a customer a big cargo of
damaged goods. Anything the victim wants he can have by simply naming
it.

Fascinated by his mastery of the subject and the obvious completeness of
his plans, I could only continue to assent. He went on:

"There's another section of the subject we must get at now, Lawson, and
decide on once and for all. You seem to have made no provisions for the
most important end of the whole business, the selling end. What is your
idea as to how we shall control the selling end?"

"I had given that little thought, Mr. Rogers," I replied. "I believe
that easily takes care of itself. The demand is always greater than the
supply. We shall have the metal to sell, the world will be more anxious
to buy than we to sell: what more can be necessary?"

"Lawson," said the master brain of the greatest and most successful
commercial enterprise in the world, "you know the stock-market, but you
don't know the first principle of working to advantage a great business
in which you absolutely control the production. The novice assumes that
consumption when it is greater than production makes the price, but this
is one of the many time-worn sophistries of business. Do you suppose
Standard Oil has built itself up to where it is and made the money it
has simply because there were always more lamps than we had oil? If you
do, you are in dense ignorance of the foundation requisite for great
success. As the world goes to-day, the prices of necessities and
luxuries are fixed and should be fixed by the man who controls both the
selling and the producing end, for there is a greater profit to be had
by supply to regulated demand and demand to regulated supply than from a
charge made and regulated by supply and demand. Standard Oil gets
to-day and has always since its birth got its enormous profit from its
'regulation' department. Production yields it a proper pr