- Now, in plain language, brief and straight, what would you have deemed the right thing, that night at the bank? With hundreds of millions subscribed, how many shares would you have thought the public should have? How many do you think now? And how should the balance have been kept for you promoters? Perhaps in answering this you will make it plain.
Sincerely yours,
(Signed) ——
In answer to Question 1, I said: All my dealings had been conducted on the basis of selling to the public a fair amount of the first section of the consolidation and I had no tremors as to consequences. I knew that whatever allotment was made them would be worth all they were to pay for it, for I was personally familiar with the value of the properties of which the section was to be composed. When Mr. Rogers, as I have explained in my story, substituted, under circumstances that rendered me defenceless, an entirely new set of mines for those programmed for the first section—properties about which I knew only what he told me—from that time on my only guarantee against the jugglery and fraud I feared was to keep in the hands of Rogers and Rockefeller so large a part of this stock that they could play no tricks on the public without themselves suffering much more severely. If they regarded the stock as so valuable a possession that it was a security to be held as "Standard Oil,"