"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