ndings are of much greater importance than
is usually supposed.

I was very much pleased to hear a remark, made by one of the prominent
bankers who visited the Edgar Thomson Works during a Bankers
Convention held at Pittsburgh. He was one of a party of some hundreds
of delegates, and after they had passed through the works he said to
our manager:

"Somebody appears to belong to these works."

He put his finger there upon one of the secrets of success. They did
belong to somebody. The president of an important manufacturing work
once boasted to me that their men had chased away the first inspector
who had ventured to appear among them, and that they had never been
troubled with another since. This was said as a matter of sincere
congratulation, but I thought to myself: "This concern will never
stand the strain of competition; it is bound to fail when hard times
come." The result proved the correctness of my belief. The surest
foundation of a manufacturing concern is quality. After that, and a
long way after, comes cost.

I gave a great deal of personal attention for some years to the
affairs of the Keystone Bridge Works, and when important contracts
were involved often went myself to meet the parties. On one such
occasion in 1868, I visited Dubuque, Iowa, with our engineer, Walter
Katte. We were competing for the building of the most important
railway bridge that had been built up to that time, a bridge across
the wide Mississippi at Dubuque, to span which was considered a great
undertaking. We found the river frozen and crossed it upon a sleigh
drawn by four horses.

That visit proved how much success turns upon trifles. We found we
were not the lowest bidder. Our chief rival was a bridge-building
concern in Chicago to which the board had decided to award the
contract. I lingered and talked with some of the directors. They were
delightfully ignorant of the merits of cast- and wrought-iron. We had
always made the upper cord of the bridge of the latter, while our
rivals' was made of cast-iron. This furnished my text. I pictured the
result of a steamer striking against the one and against the other. In
the case of the wrought-iron cord it would probably only bend; in the
case of the cast-iron it would certainly break and down would come the
bridge. One of the directors, the well-known Perry Smith, was
fortunately able to enforce my argument, by stating to the board that
what I said was undoubtedly the case about cas