times of excitement
his speech suggested the German idiom. Abruptly his air grew mysterious;
he glanced around the room, now becoming empty, and lowered his voice.

"I have been thinking a long time, I have a little scheme," he said, "and
I have been to Washington to see Watling, to talk over it. Well, he
thinks much of you. Fowndes and Ripon are good lawyers, but they are not
smart like you. See Paret, he says, and he can come down and talk to me.
So I ask you to come here. That is why I say you are wise to get home.
Honeymoons can wait--eh?"

I smiled appreciatively.

"They talk about monopoly, those Populist senators, but I ask you what is
a man in my place to do? If you don't eat, somebody eats you--is it not
so? Like the boa-constrictors--that is modern business. Look at the
Keystone Plate people, over there at Morris. For years we sold them steel
billets from which to make their plates, and three months ago they serve
notice on us that they are getting ready to make their own billets, they
buy mines north of the lakes and are building their plant. Here is a big
customer gone. Next year, maybe, the Empire Tube Company goes into the
business of making crude steel, and many more thousands of tons go from
us. What is left for us, Paret?"

"Obviously you've got to go into the tube and plate business yourselves,"
I said.

"So!" cried Mr. Scherer, triumphantly, "or it is close up. We are not
fools, no, we will not lie down and be eaten like lambs for any law.
Dickinson can put his hand on the capital, and I--I have already bought a
tract on the lakes, at Bolivar, I have already got a plant designed with
the latest modern machinery. I can put the ore right there, I can send
the coke back from here in cars which would otherwise be empty, and
manufacture tubes at eight dollars a ton less than they are selling. If
we can make tubes we can make plates, and if we can make plates we can
make boilers, and beams and girders and bridges.... It is not like it was
but where is it all leading, my friend? The time will come--is right on
us now, in respect to many products--when the market will be flooded with
tubes and plates and girders, and then we'll have to find a way to limit
production. And the inefficient mills will all be forced to shut down."

The logic seemed unanswerable, even had I cared to answer it.... He
unfolded his campaign. The Boyne Iron Works was to become the Boyne Iron
Works, Ltd., owner of various subsidi