money-shark, led a life such as a true man would map out for himself if
his Maker granted him the privilege. You would have to visit at our home
to appreciate my father's character and to understand how terrible this
sorrow is to him. Every morning of his life he spends an hour after
breakfast with my dear mother, who is a cripple from hip disease. He takes
her in his arms and brings her down from her room to the library as if she
were a child. He then reads to her--and he knows good books as well as he
knows his friends. After he takes mother back to her room, he gives an
hour to our people, the blacks of the plantation and his white tenants
throughout the county. He is a father to them all. He settles all their
troubles, big and little. Then for hours he and I go over his business
affairs. Every afternoon from four to five he devotes to his estates and
the men and women for whom he acts as trustee. He has often said to me:
'We have a clear million of money and property, and that is all any man
should have in America. It is all he is entitled to under our form of
government. Any more than that an honest man should in one way or another
return to the people from whom he has taken it. I never want my family to
have more than a million dollars.' When he went into the Seaboard affair,
he explained to me that it was to assist the Wilsons--they were old
friends, and he has acted as their solicitor for years--in building up the
South. He discussed with me the right and advisability of putting in the
trust funds. He said he considered it his duty to employ them as he did
his own in enterprises that would aid the whole people of the South,
instead of sending them to the North to be used in Wall Street as belting
for the 'System' grinder. These fortunes were made in the South by men who
loved their section of the country more than they did wealth, and why
should they not be employed to benefit that part of the country which
their makers and owners loved? I remember vividly how perplexed he was
when, at the beginning, the Wilsons would show him that the investments
were returning unusually large profits.