fellows take a strong, sound business idea--the economy of cost in
manufacture and selling--and hitch it to a load of the rottenest
business principle in the bunch--the inflation of the value of your
plant and stock--, and then wonder why people hold their noses when
their outfit drives down Wall Street. Of course, when you stop a
little leakage between the staves and dip out the sugar by the bucket
from the top, your net gain is going to be a deficit for somebody. So
if these fellows try to do business as they should do it, by clean and
sound methods and at fair and square prices, they can't earn money
enough to satisfy their stockholders, and they get sore; and if they
try to do business in the only way that's left, by clubbing
competition to death, and gouging the public, then the whole country
gets sore. It seems to me that a good many of these trusts are at a
stage where the old individual character of the businesses from which
they came is dead, and a new corporate character hasn't had time to
form and strengthen. Naturally, when a youngster hangs fire over
developing a conscience, he's got to have one licked into him.
Personally, I want to see fewer businesses put into trusts on the
canned-soup theory--add hot water and serve--before I go into one;
and I want to know that the new concern is going to put a little of
itself into every case that leaves the plant, just as I have always
put in a little of myself. Of course, I don't believe that this stage
of the trusts can last, because, in the end, a business that is
founded on doubtful values and that makes money by doubtful methods
will go to smash or be smashed, and the bigger the business the bigger
the smash. The real trust-busters are going to be the crooked trusts,
but so long as they can keep out of jail they will make it hard for
the sound and straight ones to prove their virtue. Yet once the trust
idea strikes bed-rock, and a trust is built up of sound properties
on a safe valuation; once the most capable man has had time to rise
to the head, and a new breed, trained to the new idea, to grow up
under him; and once dishonest competition--not hard competition--is
made a penitentiary offense, and the road to the penitentiary
macadamized so that it won't be impassable to the fellows who ride in
automobiles--then there'll be no more trust-busting talk, because a
trust will be the most efficient, the most economical, and the most
profitable way of doing business; and there's no use bucking that idea
or no sense in being so foolish as to want to. It would be like
grabbing a comet by the tail and trying to put a twist in it. And
there's nothing about it for a young fellow to be afraid of, because
a good man isn't lost in a big business--he simply has bigger
opportunities and more of them. The larger the interests at stake, the
less people are inclined to jeopardize them by putting them in the
hands of any one but the best man in sight.
I'm not afraid of any trust that's likely to come along for a while,
because Graham & Co. ain't any spring chicken. I'm not too old to
change, but I don't expect to have to just yet, and so long as the
trust and labor situation remains as it is I don't believe that you
and I and the kid can do much better than to follow my old rule:
_Mind your own business; own your own business; and run your own
business_.
Your affectionate father,
JOHN GRAHAM.
THE END.
End of Project Gutenberg's Old Gorgon Graham, by George Horace Lorimer