nsportation
company, where every dollar of profit comes from the people who patronise
the lines. I have worked it out on every side, and it is not right; it
would not be legal if the people, who make the laws for their own
betterment, understood their affairs as they should.'

"He was always writing to the Wilsons to conduct the affairs of the
Seaboard so that there would be remaining each year only profits enough
to keep the road up and the wharves in good condition and to pay the
annual interest and a fair dividend. And when the Wilsons came to our
house to lay before him the offer of Reinhart and his fellow plunderers to
pay enormous profits for the control of the Seaboard, he was indignant and
argued with them that the offer was an insult to honest men. It was he who
advised the trusteeship control of the Seaboard stock to prevent Reinhart
from securing control. I sat in the library when he talked to the elder
Wilson and the directors.

"He appealed directly to John Wilson to make an effort to stop the growing
tendency to use the people as pawns to enslave themselves and their
children. He said some man of undoubted probity, standing, and wealth,
someone whom the people trusted, must start the fight against these New
York fiends, whose only thought is to roll up wealth. And he told John
Wilson he was the man, since he had great wealth, honestly got by his
father and grandfather; no one would accuse him of being a hypocrite,
seeking notoriety, and his standing in the financial world was so old and
solid that it would have to listen to him. I remember-how emphatically
father said: 'I tell you, John, _even the discussion_ of such a
proposition as that scoundrel Reinhart makes is degrading to an American's
honour.' He said it didn't make the least difference if Reinhart counted
his millions by the score, and was director in thirty or forty great
institutions, and gave a fortune every year for charity and to the
church--that he was a blackleg just the same. And so is any man, he said,
who dares to say he will take the stock of a transportation company, which
represents a certain amount of money invested, and double or multiply it
by five and ten, simply because he can compel the people to pay exorbitant
fares and freight-rates and so get profits on this fraudulently increased
capital.

"It was the decision arrived at by father and the Wilsons at this meeting,
a decision to refuse in any circumstances to allow our South